[Bug 29690] Freecell fails to work on platforms where qthreads is not available

[Jeff Bailey]

Public bug reported:
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/29690

Affects: gnome-games (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Normal
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed

Description:
Upstream of Freecell have decided to make the game threaded.  As a side
effect, it means that guile now needs thread support in order for
Freecell to work.  Guile on PPC and amd64 doesn't have thread support.

There are two ways to solve this:

1) Port qthreads on these architectures.  This is not terribly hard, but
is still a reasonable amount of work to make sure it's right.  The
reason to not do this is that guile 1.8 no longer uses qthreads, so
upstream isn't going to care about this patch (although they will accept
it in their stable release).

2) Hack freecell to not use threads for now.  The use of threads was
presumably some asthetic decision by upstream.  Perhaps the freecell
help system now provides stunningly useful hints instead of just any
available choice?  It would be sad to lose that functionality. ;)

Tks,
Jeff Bailey