[ic] Perl Threading

[Mike Heins]

Quoting cfm at maine.com (cfm at maine.com):
> > I suppose someone needs to isolate which module has threading problems
> > so that work can be done to resolve this.  I think the firm insistence
> > that IC not be used with a threaded perl is unrealistic for the long
> > term.  Forcing shop keepers to recompile their own perl or replace it
> > with third-party binaries isn't a good solution.  Eventually IC needs
> > to work with the "out of the box" perl shipped with the leading
> > distributions. 
> 
> Yes, for my money it is easier to hack minivend/IC than to muck with
> the distribution.  If I wanted a separate perl, I'd be running slackware
> not debian.  Unless one runs separate production, staging and dev boxes
> compiling ones own perl is unrealistic.  We used to compile our own
> perl and every upgrade was scary.

This would be a nice goal if the distribution perl was anywhere near
reasonable.

Unfortunately, the distribution Red Hat ships is NOT reasonable. The
perl they shipped with Red Hat Linux 9 was a 5.8.0 with random patches
from the maintenance tree. This is simply unacceptable to me; it puts
them in the business of shipping a new version of Perl, untested except
for their very small usage of it.

While the perl-porters no longer describe the use of threads as experimental
in Perl 5.8.1, they did in 5.8.0. And even in 5.8.1, this message
comes up:

    Perl can be built to take advantage of threads on some systems.
    To do so, Configure can be run with -Dusethreads.

    Note that Perl built with threading support runs slightly slower
    and uses more memory than plain Perl. The current implementation
    is believed to be stable, but it is fairly new, and so should be
    treated with caution.

I would be happy to try and work toward a target of the current release
Perl 5.8.1. I will not spend 10 minutes to try and support randomly-
patched Perls.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike at perusion.com>

Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing.
-- Karl Lehenbauer