Perl/TCL threads

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 04:18:22PM -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 02:35:52PM -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
> >>On Gentoo, I ran for several months with USE="threads ithreads" for
> >>Perl, TCL, and TK.  This enables threaded interpreters and such, but
> >>"may break some apps."
> >>
> >>In my experience, once Perl/TCL/TK is compiled threaded, the ABI is
> >>different, but the API is the same.  Thus, xchat's perl/tcl plug-ins,
> >>and anything else linked against the perl, TCL, TK, etc libraries, must
> >>be recompiled against the new libraries.  Scripts are fine.
> >>
> >>Does ubuntu use threads in the interpreter languages?  If not, and
> >>nothing in main breaks from it, I'd like to see this.  It's not
> >>immensely important, though.
> > 
> > Just for Perl, that's a couple of hundred packages that would need to be
> > changed. I think we'd be best off waiting until Debian does this
> > (perhaps with a new upstream release of Perl).
> 
> changed being recompiled, or rewritten?

Probably just recompiled, but some package names would have to change,
dependencies would have to be checked thoroughly, and there might have
to be a Perl policy change to get everything consistent. (At least,
that's what has had to happen for similar things in the past.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]