Channels provide no means to report an error. Closing a channel could
mean anything.
This is particularly important when dealing with IO, which we do quite
often in the pack builder. Use ForEach which returns an error instead.
The library stores error information in thread-local storage, which
means we need to make sure that the Go runtime doesn't switch OS
threads between the time we call a function and th time we attempt to
retrieve the error information.
Don't name the return values, as they conflict with the names we want
inside and the types don't match what we want to have inside. We need
them to be two-way channels in the function, and then pass
unidirectional references to the different functions.
In case of an error in the writer, the packbuilder will stay around
waiting for someone to read from its channel. The state associated
with a packbuilder is non-trivial and it will keep a reference to the
object, so the GC won't be able to free it.
Change the ForEach interface to also return a "stop" channel. Closing
the channel or writing into it will cause the first receive clause to
act, making the callback to return -1, aborting the operation and
ending the goroutine, freeing its hold on the packbuilder.
Carlos Martín Nieto
Jesper Hansen
Vicent Martí
Michael Crosby
Axel Wagner