[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Some major reasons to add a Tcl/Tk 8.5 package

[Michael Schlenker]

Igor Goryachev schrieb:
> Michael Schlenker <schlenk at uni-oldenburg.de> writes:
> 
>> Threaded/non-threaded:
>> I know that debian is one of the few to use a fully thread enabled
>> tcl-8.4 in the default install and a non-threaded tcl-8.3. The current
>> mood upstream is to make thread-enabled the default sometime in the
>> (near) future, so debian should be well prepared.
>> Many well behaved packages can use --enable-threads during compile time
>> to include the mutexes and locks for working in a threaded environment,
>> but stay loadable without changes in non-thread enabled builds. Also,
>> STUBS enabled packages compiled with --enable-thread may be used with
>> all Tcl versions from 8.1 to 8.5 without changes.
> 
> Hello, Michael.
> 
> Have you seen bug #312258 (http://bugs.debian.org/312258)? There were
> random freezes which accured while using Tcl/Tk built with threads
> enabled. This (mis)behaviour couldn't be reproduced when using xorg. I
> had no freezes of tcl/tk since I updated my several workstations to
> Testing/Etch (two months or so).
> 
Yes, i have seen it quite a while ago and it was discussed in the
Tcl'ers chat, where a lot of the Tcl core team hangs out usually, as you
may know.

Some freezes may be due to bugs in glibc/kernel code (someone mentioned
java has the same problem), at least that was part of the consensus there.

There were also some fixes by Zoran Vassiljevic, the upstream Tcl
threads maintainer, which may have fixed some of the issues. But there
surely are issues left, see for example:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1082283&group_id=10894&atid=110894

Michael