On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 11:26:50AM -0500, Henry Hartley wrote: > > I've set up a FC3 box and want to run Interchange > (http://www.icdevgroup.org/) on it. The default perl on Fedora Core > (and this was true with RHL since 8) has threading turned on. > Interchange requires that threading be dissabled in order to run. Now, > I've grabbed the source and rebuilt perl and things are basically > working but out of curiosity, is the decision to enable threads in FC's > perl one that anyone would be willing to reconsider? Is threaded perl > required by enough people at this point to justify it? Here's a piece > of a thread (admitedly it's a bit old - from April 2003) discussing the > topic. [snip] The author of that article seems to be conflating two topics; the use of a perl interpreter with thread-support compiled in, and actually making use of the thread facilities. I am not aware of any significant bugs that affect a single-threaded program running on a ithread-enabled perl interpreter that don't also appear with a 'vanilla' interpeter. Thus Interchange should work just as well on both interpeters, *unless* there is a specific reason which the article doesn't mention. As to whether Interchange would work successfully in a multi-threaded Perl application is an entirely different matter; I can well believe that it doesn't; lots of Perl code and modules don't, as they haven't been specifically written or modified to be thread-safe. The first version of Perl to make an ithreads API accessible to the user was version 5.8.0, released in July 2002, and yes, there were a lot of threads-related bugs in it; since then three have been 6 further releases, (current is 5.8.6; FC3 has 5.8.5), and there have been a lot of threads-related fixes during that time, many of them by me. So I can't see any major reason for not making the default perl compiler ithread-enabled. Dave -- "Foul and greedy Dwarf - you have eaten the last candle." -- "Hordes of the Things", BBC Radio.
