***** Future Features / Interface Changes *****

optimizations:
- support alternate, faster locking mechanisms (filesystem and/or SysV shmem)
- allow for shared memory as transport medium
    - current alternative is to use BerkeleyDB, e.g. forks::BerkeleyDB
- implement more methods using custom filters (to reduce Storable usage)

Make thread objects shared in nature, such that their properties may be read
across all threads.  Will make _handle more reliable, and allow for thread
state params to be persisted.

Add a method to give the user run-time privilege control over Unix socket 
file descriptors (for additional security control).

Possibly implement TTY wrapper control for Perl debugger, such that user has simpler
API functions to call to bind a thread to a TTY.  Idea is to integrate debugger
TTY control functionality as thread create arguments, to allow for unique tty
subroutines to be defined per thread, or unique TTY values to be "bound" to specific
threads.

Consider interfacing with graphical Perl debugger intefaces, to simplify
multi-threaded debugging; managing multiple TTYs, although supported in different
terminals (1 per thread), can be conceptually difficult.  Considering interface
to Devel::PDB.  Consider support for Eclipse.  Open to suggestions, comments, patches.


***** Issues to Address *****

Need to load internally cached, shared REF values from server, not from first use
to insure that values are correctly loaded, to insure they correctly evaluate when
used in is_shared(). (TODO temp patch seen in t/forks09.t)

Circular references and ref(), Scalar::Util::reftype(), attribute::reftype() don't
work well with perltie shared variables.  Likely a limitation of how we're using
variables in a remote process.  May be able to improve on this by overloading
all these functions with a forks::shared aware function that contacts remote process
when variable is shared to determine what has circular recursion and what doesn't.

END { } blocks should be skipped unless they were defined in a thread: eval "END {...}"
or module use/require).  One idea is to somehow sneak POSIX::_exit(), as long as we
are careful to flush buffered sockets before calling it.  NOTE: this behavior likely
should ONLY occur when in native ithreads mode; I consider END {...} block execution
a good thing for all threads that were aware of it otherwise.  (Note: better programming
practice would be to use DESTROY method whenever possible, but END is important
for some modules.

Environment variables should be shared among all threads (ithreads behavior).

Current working directory should be shared among all threads (ithreads behavior).  Note
that this may be considered bug in current ithreads implementation.

Should implement to-the-letter behavior: when parent thread calls ->kill and target
doesn't have a signal handler registered, caller should croak.  Current behavior is
target emits a warning, exits, and kill caller quietly continues.

Memory is currently not reclaimed for shared variables that are no longer
referenced by any thread.  Possible solutions: implement PL_destroyhook; or use
STORE for threads::shared objects, and DESTROY for threads, to track shared var _refcnt.
DESTROY will be called on shared objects in an exiting thread, even if still
referenced in other threads.  If can track global _refcnt, could determine refcnt
state from server and destroy only when 0.

Determine if it is possible to recover all memory from detached threads.  Joined
threads reclaim all shared memory (very stable memory usage); detached threads
currently use a small amount of memory (~200Kb/100K threads) even after they
complete.

exit() in a thread may allow other threads that were waiting to join that thread
to continue before they are terminated (race condition).  Join should not return.

Add more defensive logic in _join() to prevent hang on join (for processes
that have already terminated).  May wish to check client socket when join for
that thread is requested: if socket exception, then assume client terminated;
otherwise, wait for client (regularly checking client socket connection to
determine if it has prematurely closed).

Perl 5.6 doesn't seem to respond to thread global exit in this case:
use forks; threads->new(sub { exit($desired_exit_val);} )->join(); sleep 10; sleep 10;

***** Possible Issues to Address *****

In rare cases, if the main thread dies, the server process doesn't appear to
shut down correctly.  Sometimes, it appears to use high CPU usage (is stuck in a loop
somewhere).  It is likely that a socket disconnect is getting a read or write
while loop stuck in a loop, and that additional error checking (or non-error
occurrence but no change to the amount of data read/written) might help the
state of things.  Reproducing this one is pretty hard--I can't create the
exact conditions yet to manually trigger it.  Problem last seen in forks 0.20.
Note that this issue may have been squashed in forks 0.21, as most of the socket
handling was rewritten in that release.

Need to look into why some signals very rarely are not handled by threads
(i.e. SIGTERM should cause thread to exit--but thread appears to have ignored
signal.  Is this a side effect of Perl's safe signal handling mechanism?).
The thread does appear to actually get the signal, but sometimes it doesn't
seem to completely exit.  Problem last seen in forks 0.23, but not seen since
forks 0.25, so may be resolved.


***** Miscellaneous Items *****

Consider implementing virtual signals that map to one signal handler, thus allowing
use of special signals like 'STOP', 'KILL', etc. for improved portability with
scripts that might use these signal names already.  e.g. ABRT might be used across
all threads and a virtual signal mask check could be tracked by the shared server.

Update documentation to discuss fault-tolerance (individual thread can't take down the thread group, even with memory faults like segfault).  Very helpful for high-availability systems.

Consider checking _check_pl_signal_unsafe_flag for any thread signaling behavior,
and warn user about (or prevent from using) signals (i.e. deadlock detect, $t->kill).

Allow manual disabling of forks.pm signal management (for embedding with other
pragmas or interfaces that implement their own signals management, such as mod_perl
via Apache::forks).

Need a way to keep deserialized shared variable references consistent between
lookups, e.g.
    my $shared :shared = &share({});
    $$shared{'foo'} = 'bar';
    my $str1 = "$shared";
    my $str2 = "$shared";
    ok($str1 eq $str2, 'stringify');
This is a side-effect of Storable, which reconstitutes a new tied hash each time
FETCH returns a shared variable.
This might be solved with overload.pm, although documentation indicates that it
may not work with Storable since we're masking the master package in a different
file (Storable uses XS load_module, which tries to load real threads/shared.pm even
though %INC is populated).  (I wonder if it's possible to fake out load_module?)
Thus, maybe we can implement a thread-local reference cache for all shared
variables (dynamically populated as they are FETCHed), which returns the
thread-local copy instead of the server copy.  (Same idea as forks::BerkeleyDB,
but caching the server copy instead.)  Benefit to this method is that ref()
and refaddr() will return the same results, although won't return the same value
as is_shared() unless we change this to use the same logic.
UPDATE: we need to get away from the caching mechanism, or somehow have logic
that resolves REF types (before or in) the shared server such that it returns
a shared variable to the code.  The code itself should be able to know the following:
1. when a REF is a shared variable
2. when a REF has changed in the shared process, we need to make sure all child threads
that have a reference to it are correctly updated.

Enable custom concurrent lock interface to support optimized locking mechanisms;
specifically, SysV semaphores, filesystem (+alarm/ALRM), or other possibilities.

Add additional tests to rigorously test tied handle (for shared var) behavior.
Test delete with single, hash slice, and array slice elements.

Cache signal names from Config.pm for higher performance (avoid tied access)?

Begin adding some sort of CLONE forks.pm compatibility framework to insure that
modules that implement non-forks.pm CLONE methods are supported.  Currently,
DBI is the only known module that may need a CLONE patch, and this is only to
suppress annoying warning for resources that are closed (or is this something
that actually needs to be fixed in DBI?)

Signals sent to main thread can propagate to all threads.  We need to
prevent this from happening, if possible, to replicate threads.pm behavior.
This may be due to signal being sent to a process group (so it may not be
blockable).

Add recursive lock tests with cond_* (to test that recursive locks are
correctly acquired and released).

Add tests to validate that storing CODE refs in shared variables works.

Add documentation explaining that forks installs a SIGCHLD handler by default,
and that system calls in your user code may be interrupted by this handler
at any time (threads exiting), depending on the system call and if your kernel
auto-continues the system call after handling the signal.

NOTE: There still appears to be an issue with the last value of $! not being
cleared and EINTR still being returned on the next accept() vall.  Setting $!
to undef before calling the system call appears to clear the issue.  This is
system behavior outside of forks module that needs more research to resolve.

A few suggestions if this is an issue:

1. Check if $! == POSIX::EINTR() if your system call returns undef.  If so,
manually re-enter into (call again) the system call, like:

       while((my $conn = $server->accept) || $! == EINTR) {
          next if $! == EINTR;
          ...
       }

This is the most portable solution.

2. Localize $SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE' when performing your interruptible
(non-reentrant) system call.  For example:

       my $conn;
       my $loop = 1;
       while($loop) {
          {
              local $SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE';
              $conn = $server->accept;
              next if $! == EINTR;
              last unless $conn;
          }
          ...
       }

This is a more verbose but acceptable solution.

   
3. Set $SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE' after loading the forks module.

This is the simplest solution as it applies globally to all system calls, but be
warned that this may cause the exit value of your script to be ignored
(returns -1) depending on your kernel behavior.  You can always check your kernel
behavior by executing the following at a shell command line:

    perl -e '$SIG{CHLD} = "IGNORE"; exit(42);'; echo "Expected 42. Got $?"
