Naming things and the "busy" confusion

[Dridi Boukelmoune]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 1:12 PM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>
> --------
> Dridi Boukelmoune writes:
>
> > On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 10:56=E2=80=AFAM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.=
> > dk> wrote:
> > >
> > > As tempted as I am to go "I have UTF-8 and I'm not afraid to use
> > > it" and rename to "=C3=A9cluse", I personally see it more as some sort
> > > of distribution mechanism than as a flow-control mechanism.
> >
> > I talked about coordination, not flow control. The principle is two
> > parts of a canal operating at different levels (client vs backend) and
> > the sluice coordinating the transit of boats (body bytes) from one
> > level to the other. Sure that involve some amounts of flow control,
> > but that's just means to an end.
>
> /me inhales deeply...

Yes, bikeshed requires energy.

> The reason you need the sluice in the first place is because you
> want to control the flow of the river with a dam :-)
>
> But the reason I say it looks more like a "distrbution mechanism"
> is that in difference from a sluice, which has one entrace and one
> exit, we have one entrance and as many exits as there are clients
> streaming this object.
>
> If you want a precise technological prior art, it would be the
> "fan-out" points in private telex networks.
>
> For instance a news-providers like Reuters, would have one leased
> telex-circuit from London to Paris, where it would be fanned out
> to Nice, Strassbourg, Bruxelles (and all the local Paris newspapers),
> and from Nice to Torino, and from there to Milano and Rome etc.
> forming a tree structure which a minmal (in terms of line costs)
> spanning tree.
>
> In North America FCC made a rule that you paid AT&T the cost of the
> minimal spanning tree, which is why Knuth's algorithm became so
> important so fast.
>
> Both customers and AT&T gamed that FCC rule.
>
> Companies cost-optimized their nets by adding nodes they did not
> need in remote hamlets like Hoople, North Dakota, because gave them
> a cheaper connection from Chicago to San Francisco etc.
>
> AT&T on the other hand implemented the actual network the way
> which made most economic sense to them, which meant that it was
> anyones guess what the delay in the total network would be.
>
> That again got reflected in IBM's VTAM which has some very bizarre
> configuration options for node timeouts and
>
> ...
>
> Sorry, we were taking about what again ?  :-)
>
>
> If you want a really weird, but precise name suggestion: "Hopper"
>
> That word searches horribly but try "input hopper" or "grain hopper"
> and try to generalize yourself.

But then we are completely out of the "stream" lexical field. If I
wanted a different approximation I would have suggested something like
demux or whatever.

The points remain:

- OC_F_BUSY has a specific role and meaning
- the name busyobj aka bo is misleading, being unrelated
- boc is misleading on two different levels

If you want your boat to fan out, call it a quantum boat that may take
any fork on the stream after passing the hyper-sluice, and only a
cosmic VDP can tell when it tries to observe the boat.

I'll take the direction this thread took as a no on renaming anything
and a vote in favor of entertaining a comfortable confusion.