Add a few extra docstring comments about thread-safe clients/connections

Author: Dana Powers

kafka/client.py

@@ -254,8 +254,11 @@ def close(self):
 
     def copy(self):
         """
-        Create an inactive copy of the client object
-        A reinit() has to be done on the copy before it can be used again
+        Create an inactive copy of the client object, suitable for passing
+        to a separate thread.
+
+        Note that the copied connections are not initialized, so reinit() must
+        be called on the returned copy.
         """
         c = copy.deepcopy(self)
         for key in c.conns:

kafka/conn.py

@@ -161,9 +161,11 @@ def recv(self, request_id):
 
     def copy(self):
         """
-        Create an inactive copy of the connection object
-        A reinit() has to be done on the copy before it can be used again
-        return a new KafkaConnection object
+        Create an inactive copy of the connection object, suitable for
+        passing to a background thread.
+
+        The returned copy is not connected; you must call reinit() before
+        using.
         """
         c = copy.deepcopy(self)
         # Python 3 doesn't copy custom attributes of the threadlocal subclass

kafka/producer/base.py

@@ -206,6 +206,8 @@ class Producer(object):
 
     Arguments:
         client (KafkaClient): instance to use for broker communications.
+            If async=True, the background thread will use client.copy(),
+            which is expected to return a thread-safe object.
         codec (kafka.protocol.ALL_CODECS): compression codec to use.
         req_acks (int, optional): A value indicating the acknowledgements that
             the server must receive before responding to the request,