Re: Threaded Perl
On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 03:52:42PM -0800, Ryan White wrote:
>I posted to debian-user but no one seems to know or want to respond. So I
>was wondering what the status of perl-thread is? Is it no longer being
>developed (packaged) or is it just not going to make it in testing. Is there
>a different package that provides the same thing now? Am I stuck compiling
>my own perl binary? I'm sure I'm not the first one to need thread support in
>perl, I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
Sorry Ryan, for the moment you are stuck compiling your own binary.
I'm loathe to enable threading support in the standard perl package
given that the documentation lists a bunch of warnings and notes that
"it is not recommended for production machines".
In addition, enabling thread support would break binary compatibility
with the 100+ current binary perl modules.
Providing a separate perl-thread (and libperl5.6-thread) package still
has the binary compatibility issues, meaning that any binary module
package which is to be used by perl-thread needs to be built twice:
once for the perl package and once for perl-thread.
To further complicate matters, there are two different threading models:
5.005 threads and ithreads. The former allows user-level threads to be
created, the latter does not but is useful for interfacing with threaded
libraries.
So conceivably there would be three perl interpreters (perl, perl-thread
and perl-ithread) and in cases three versions binary modules
(libfoo-perl, libfoo-perl-thread, libfoo-perl-ithread).
If/when threading support stabilises I will consider making the standard
perl thread-enabled (which would require rebuilding a bunch of packages
transitionally, but would be simpler in the long term).
I will re-investigate the situation when 5.8.0 is released but for now
I'm afraid that building your own perl is required if you need threads.
Regards,
--
Brendan O'Dea
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