idle BUG

[John Roth]

"Robin Becker" <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:pkvruLAg7QK7Ewi3 at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk...
> I think this must be a bug in Tkinter, but since no one ever responds I
> thought I'd whine about idle instead.
>
> I run python2.1 Win95 OSR2.
> Start a command window
> run python idle.py

It also happens when you try to execute from the DOS command
line.

> Kill the idle window using the mouse (click on the x). In some unknown
> percentage of cases (like 50%) the process hangs and doesn't return to
> the command window.

It may be connected with exception handling. My purely subjective impression
is that I get it irregularly when there has been an exception, and seldom
(or never)
if there hasn't been one.

I also hadn't related it to the close button as opposed to the File|Exit
command.
I think that's a significant fact, since they have two very, and I mean
very, different
processing paths.

> The hung process is very destructive and makes it impossible to reboot
> the machine properly. This bug has been present for a very long time and
> I'm fed up with it.

I get rid of the command line with the three fingered salute
(CTL-ALT-DELETE).
Sometimes (not always) this causes Windows to hang on shutdown. Then it goes
through a disk check on startup.

> It's clearly some kind of race between python and Tcl/Tk. The problem
> doesn't occur on win2k so I guess there's some difference between the
> run times that helps.

Technically, it can't be a "race" condition, since there is only one process
(or
thread). I suspect the difference is that Win 9x and Win 2k may post events
in different orders, thus causing the confusion. They are, after all,
completely
different code bases, and Win 2K doesn't have the global lock that Win 9x
has when it's accessing legacy 16bit functionality.

> similar apps in pure tcl/tk don't show this behaviour although it's
> possible to make them do stupid things.

I remember running across a patch somewhere reasonably official to the
Tk event handling kernel to allow Python to get a somewhat different set of
conditions on waiting for events. Since I know nothing about the issues, it
went
in the eyeball and promptly migrated to random access memory, where it
lost any association with a URL.

Wish I could help more, but I'm not a windows developer, so I am very shakey
on using the developer tools, like event traces. I'd like it fixed, but it's
going to have
to wait on someone who knows low level Windows development.

> --
> Robin Becker

John Roth