[GRASS5] Tcl8.4 support?

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> maybe this can help shed some light:
>  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-December/031107.html
>  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=171353
>   "threading is an 8.4 feature.  It's not even an option in 8.3."
> 
> or perhaps this:
>  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=201062

I'll look at those later.

> If it is limited to Debian/Testing for whatever reason, we can always
> just make the adjustment in the Debian package & hopefully if it is a
> glibc-land bug it will be sorted out before the next Debian release (a
> new glibc & tcltk 8.4 should arrive into Testing in a couple of weeks,
> e.g.). In the mean time I think most people running Debian Testing or
> Unstable should be adventurous enough to add the change by hand if
> compiling from source, thus a --nviz-pthread switch isn't needed (yet).
> 
> I tried compiling with gcc 2.95, but that didn't make any difference. I
> can't test with an older glibc without ripping everything up so I won't.
> Looks like threading in Tcl8.4 though. I wonder if the tcl8.4 others
> have reported working was built with the without-threading option?

Possibly. FWIW, does libtcl itself have a dependency upon libpthread
(according to ldd)? Or, for that matter, libGL?

One other thing which might be instructive would be to build your own
tclsh and/or wish executables (the source code for these programs is
normally installed as e.g. /usr/lib/tcl8.4/tclAppInit.c and
/usr/lib/tk8.4/tkAppInit.c), both with and without -lpthread, and see
how "exec" behaves. If libtcl doesn't have a dependency upon
libpthread, but a self-built tclsh/wish doesn't work without you
adding -lpthread to the link command, that suggests that libtcl needs
to have that dependency added.

I'm fairly sure that the problem isn't due to NVWISH2.2 calling fork()
itself; while it does import system(), that's only used for spawning
the NetPBM utilities when dumping PPM files.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>