Re: [TCLCORE] The Long and Winding Road.. to 8.6.0

[Elchonon E. <cas...@gm...>]

Donal K. Fellows wrote:
>   Thread package... We've needed this for ages (along with making the
>   threaded build default) so that we can take advantage of modern
>   hardware, and it is a quite thoroughly tested configuration and
>   package, but we keep getting stymied by Expect on Unix. Can we dare
>   to move anyway? Can we tell if Expect needs problem things like
>   [fork]? A lot of expect scripts don't.
What are the problems with Expect that make threads such a non-option? 
What options are there for a fix, or a work-around? If there were a good 
writeup of the issue, a good starting point would be to include a note 
in the Expect distribution, and possibly have Expect's ./configure issue 
a warning if you're configuring against a threaded Tcl.

While I like Expect, and would very much hate to lose it, I don't think 
an extension should be able to hold Tcl hostage in the way that it 
sounds like Expect is doing. My opinion is that you should do what you 
need to with Tcl. By all means, of course, let Expect know how and why 
it's being broken, and maybe if what's being broken is important enough, 
someone will find a way to fix it. In the mean time, if they need it 
that badly, they'll still be able to make their own non-threaded build, 
just for Expect, right?

-EE