I'm reading through the documentation for the schedule API and in the "Run in the Background" example they define the run method as a class method in their ScheduleThread class. The code is below: import threading import time import schedule def run_continuously(interval=1): """Continuously run, while executing pending jobs at each elapsed time interval. @return cease_continuous_run: threading. Event which can be set to cease continuous run. Please note that it is *intended behavior that run_continuously() does not run missed jobs*. For example, if you've registered a job that should run every minute and you set a continuous run interval of one hour then your job won't be run 60 times at each interval but only once. """ cease_continuous_run = threading.Event() class ScheduleThread(threading.Thread): @classmethod def run(cls): while not cease_continuous_run.is_set(): schedule.run_pending() time.sleep(interval) continuous_thread = ScheduleThread() continuous_thread.start() return cease_continuous_run def background_job(): print('Hello from the background thread') schedule.every().second.do(background_job) # Start the background thread stop_run_continuously = run_continuously() # Do some other things... time.sleep(10) # Stop the background thread stop_run_continuously.set() I don't understand why they use @classmethod here. From doing a bit of research it seems that run() should always be an instance method in Thread subclasses. Is this a mistake or am I missing something? I ran the code unaltered from the documentation and then I changed the classmethod to an instance method (removed the decorator and replaced run(cls) with run(self)) and ran the code again and the behavior was identical. I expected something to break or there to be different behavior. Continue reading...
