Timeouts about serial

[rugginoso]

@pascaldekloe if you wait a little (go 1.10 I guess) you will get this for free: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/71770

[pascaldekloe]

Unmaintained indeed. For now I made timeouts work with https://github.com/pascaldekloe/nbio.

[tarm]

The package works for me and is feature complete for my needs, so I am not actively making changes to it. The package has and does transfer millions of bytes in production systems and I have an active interest in making sure it continues to do so.

From my perspective, it does what I need it to, but if other people have other needs, then pull requests that are well designed and work across all platforms will be accepted.

Read timeouts already exist in the package, but they are have a different API than net.Conn. Search for timeout in https://godoc.org/github.com/tarm/serial The documentation of timeouts could be better (part of the docs say that still need to be implemented). The low level serial timeouts work differently than socket based timeouts and work differently on different platforms, so I suspect implementing the net.Conn timeout API would either be very complicated or would be misleading to people.

[pascaldekloe]

Now I see that the read timeout is per request. 🔔

“Implementations of Read are discouraged from returning a zero byte count with a nil error”
… and:
“Callers should treat a return of 0 and nil as indicating that nothing happened”
— https://godoc.org/io#Reader

Therefore a dedicated error is required such as the following.
https://godoc.org/github.com/pascaldekloe/nbio#ErrNoData

Do you agree @tarm?

PS
Maybe the "works for me" and the pull request barrier should be in the README to prevent disappointment? ;-)

[pascaldekloe]

Indeed, the proposed convention seems to be the way to go. However I'm still waiting on @tarm to respond, again…

[jonaz]

status on this one @tarm ?