I temporarily applied it as a means of testing the revised event loops
in r10040, and accidentally folded it into my final commit instead of
backing it out. Ahem.
[originally from svn r10042]
[r10040 == 5c4ce2fadf]
This change attempts to reinstate as a universal property something
which was sporadically true of the ad-hockery that came before
toplevel callbacks: that if there's a _very long_ queue of things to
be done through the callback mechanism, the doing of them will be
interleaved with re-checks of other event sources, which might (e.g.)
cause a flag to be set which makes the next callback decide not to do
anything after all.
[originally from svn r10040]
This is a little like schedule_timer, in that the callback you provide
will be run from the top-level message loop of whatever application
you're in; but unlike the timer mechanism, it will happen
_immediately_.
The aim is to provide a general way to avoid re-entrance of code, in
cases where just _doing_ the thing you want done is liable to trigger
a confusing recursive call to the function in which you came to the
decision to do it; instead, you just request a top-level callback at
the message loop's earliest convenience, and do it then.
[originally from svn r10019]
Simon Tatham