[GRASS5] Tcl8.4 support?

Hamish hamish_nospam at yahoo.com
Tue Sep 16 01:34:28 EDT 2003


> > > > But back to Debian with TclTk 8.4 and the bug as reported in
> > > > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel/1883
> > > > 
> > > > "it does freeze up (0% cpu) at the first instance of "exec"
> > > > in etc/nviz2.2/scripts/nviz2.2_script, line 78:   (Adding panels
> > > > section)    set panels [exec cat $index]
> > > > 
> > > > (I tried placing some exec's further up in the script & they did
> > > > the same lock-up)"
> > 
> > G: One thing which might make a difference: try adding "-lpthread"
> > to the link command. I've occasionally encountered all sorts of
> > odd behaviour with programs which are linked against libraries
> > which are linked against libpthread (typically libGL), but where
> > the binary itself isn't linked directly against libpthread.
...
> > >  (added to src.contrib/GMSL/NVIZ2.2/src/Gmakefile  XTRA_LDFLAGS ?)
> > 
> > 
> > That works(!)
> 
> Damn.
> 
> I have absolutely no idea how we could make configure detect this
> situation.
...
> The only easy solution is to provide a switch, e.g. --nviz-pthread,
> which explicitly add -lpthread to the NVIZ linking switches. At least,
> providing the switch is easy enough; dealing with user queries of the
> form "what does this switch do and should I use it?" is likely to be
> less straightforward.

That' still just treating the symptom.. (although that's possibly all we
can do from our end)

AFAIK, this is currently only a problem with Debian/Testing. Is anybody
running Gentoo or another bleeding edge distro who can try this? It
would be bad for the next version of SuSE/RedHat to come out with a new
glibc, tcl, etc & start showing this behaviour too.


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


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?


In respect to the NVIZ child process SegFaulting with integer-maps bug, 
so far only thing I see in common is it works if glibc is older than
2.3.1, but that's not to say that's what it is. Can others on newer
systems check?


thanks for the insight,
Hamish




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