The Erlang and Elixir docs disagree about late call replies

I love a docs mismatch. It's the easiest kind of fix to argue for. I'd keep half of that Elixir paragraph, though. The advice about discarding garbage tuples is stale for GenServer.call on a current OTP. The useful part is the sentence before it, that the caller exits while the server may still be working. Aliases don't change that at all.

So a two-part rule for the docs. Drop the garbage-message advice for the call itself. Keep the bit about the server finishing anyway, and probably expand it, because a doctest showing {:ok, 1} will never tell anyone.

The catching is the part I'd look at harder. Code that catches the timeout exit usually does it to retry. The first request is still in the server's queue or already running, so the retry runs the same operation a second time. The alias hides the first reply, and the first effect has happened anyway.

If the operation only reads, fine. If it writes, the retry needs a request identity the server can check, or the caller should let the exit happen instead of retrying.

On a current OTP the Erlang text is the one to trust. A server sleeps longer than the call allows and then replies. The caller wraps GenServer.call in catch :exit, _ and then runs flush(). Nothing. The late reply never shows up.

patchkit's order is the one that costs something. Send a second call right after catching the first, and the server handles the first request to the end, then the second, so both side effects happen.