[Orbit-python-list] workaround for gtk+corba

[Brian C. <bc...@th...>]

Operating on the theory that the problem is the threading, I rebuilt pygtk w/o
thread support (orbit-python has it disabled with a #define).

This appears to work. The glade top window came up, and it was able to process
a servant method invocation via orbit. Whoohoo.

The failure case (as I understand it) was occurring because pygtk was doing a
thread save prior to gtk_main(), and then the first corba event would attempt
to call into python w/o doing a thread restore. Then I'd get the thread error.

Enabling threading in orbit-python merely caused it to fail in the same
callback, on thread restore. I suspect this is because it's attempting to
restore from an uninitialized variable (since it's normally initialized in
orb.run(), which is never invoked).

There seems to be a significant design problem here with the python thread
model. Perhaps python modules need to agree on a policy for storing thread
info, so it can be shared. I don't know if it's possible for modules to
share information.

b.c.