[Bioperl-l] Seeking comments, Bio::Species memleak fix

[Chris Fields]

No comments.  I'm assuming this is okay to merge into master branch, so will merge in later today.

chris

On Jun 30, 2010, at 12:35 PM, Chris Fields wrote:

> All,
> 
> I have a branch in github (topic/species_proxy) that converts
> Bio::Species into a proxy class.  This appears to fix a ton of problems
> introduced during the Tree/Taxonomy refactoring a few years back.
> 
> Advantages:
> 
> 1) No need for Scalar::Util::weaken within Bio::Species or
> Bio::Tree::Node.  Cleanup methods are handled during instance
> destruction.
> 
> 2) This paves the way a bit more for eventual deprecation of
> Bio::Species in 1.7.
> 
> 3) Works with bioperl-db and BioSQL as is (passes on both my local
> Ubuntu 9.10 and Mac OS X 10.6), perl 5.10 and 5.12, should work with
> earlier perl versions.
> 
> Disadvantages:
> 
> 1) For every Bio::Species, we have a Bio::Taxon, a Bio::Tree::Tree, and
> a Bio::DB::Taxonomy (one instance more than the previous Bio::Species
> implementation).  We can probably reduce that down considerably by
> creating the needed instances lazily.
> 
> This fixes:
> 
> bug 3017  use threads to get genbank file error
> bug 2594  Bio::Species memory leak
> 
> and possibly others:
> 
> bug 2773  Bio::Tree::Node gets destroyed even though it is still live
> 
> If there are no comments, I'll merge this with the master branch in the
> next few days.
> 
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> (NOTE: skip the next two paragraphs if you don't want to read nasty
> implementation details)
> 
> Bio::Species had previously inherited from Bio::Taxon, but also required
> it to hold a Bio::Tree::Tree which contained a circular reference back
> to the Bio::Species object, thus requiring Scalar::Util::weaken.  This
> has caused several hard-to-diagnose problems with premature garbage
> collection, including some issues with threads (bug 3017).  
> 
> The above proxy fix converts Bio::Species into a proxy class, which only
> inherits the interface (Bio::Tree::NodeI), and delegates to an internal
> Bio::Taxon and a Bio::Tree::Tree.  Neither contained object has a
> reference back to the Bio::Species instance, thus the class can perform
> proper garbage collection.  
> 
> chris
> 
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