[ic] interchange and thread enabled Perl

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 08:50:38AM -0400, Mike Heins wrote:
> Quoting Toni Mueller (support-ic@oeko.net):
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I just wanted to play with the latest interchange nightly, and got
> > an error message from 'configure':
> > 
> > 	"Interchange will not work with a thread-enabled perl."
> > 
> > Tested with Interchange 4.9.7-200304140658 and perl 5.8.0-17 (on i386).
> > 
> > I guess that thread enabled Perl will become more common in the
> > near future.
> > 
> It appears that Perl 5.8.0's ithread implementation is much better than
> previous ones, which wouldn't even begin to run Interchange properly.
> But it is not good enough to work well under all conditions. Randy
> Moore of the core group discovered a case where vec() lost its map, and
> I am positive there are many other little problems especially in
> PreFork mode. Interchange pushes Perl pretty hard.
> 
> In fact, I wouldn't doubt that some of the locking problems people
> are now having on Red Hat weren't due to this; I run some very
> busy IC sites and don't see them at all.

FWIW, Debian perl (unstable) is threaded, so yes, I think it's only a
matter of a little time before most packages distribute threaded perl:

Summary of my perl5 (revision 5.0 version 8 subversion 0) configuration:
  Platform:
      osname=linux, osvers=2.4.19, archname=i386-linux-thread-multi
Characteristics of this binary (from libperl):
  Compile-time options: MULTIPLICITY USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT

> 
> Thus the new enforcement of the requirement. Before it was enforced
> by the fact that noone distributed a Perl with threads enabled, and
> the fact that Interchange wouldn't even start with threads enabled
> should someone build such a Perl.
> 
> Red Hat distributed their perl for 8.0 and 9.0 with threads enabled,
> which is *not* the default. This is an extremely bad decision; the
> number of Perl scripts and programs which use threads must be far less
> than one in 1,000, and anyone seriously using such a program must keep
> up with the latest builds and modules to fight bugs.
> 

-- 

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