What steps will reproduce the problem?

I often use code like

if lock.acquire(): try: pass finally: lock.release()

acquire() simply returns on successful lock acquiry. This renders above code inoperable, since None evaluates to False.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead? lock.acquire() should return True on successful acquire.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system? Any

Please provide any additional information below. None

Is there some reason you don't use

with lock: do_stuff

? That will do the acquire/release dance automatically.

Well, two reasons, actually: with lock: do_stuff does not support the timeout argument, and lock.acquire() from threading/multiprocessing returns True as well, and it's nice for APIs to have consistent behaviour.

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Actually, you can do with MyLock(timeout=42): pass

Christian, does gc@birzan.org's comment work for you?