[Python-Dev] ActiveState & fork & Perl

[Greg Stein]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 
> > Having threads by default will make a lot of things much simpler
> > (in terms of knowing the default platform). Can't tell you how
> > many times I curse to find that the default RedHat distribution
> > (as of 5.x) did not use threads, even though they are well-
> > supported on Linux.
> 
> I have a vague memory that once upon a time, the standard
> X libraries shipped with RedHat weren't thread safe, and
> Tkinter didn't work if you compiled Python with threads.
> 
> but I might be wrong and/or that may have changed...

Yes, it has changed. RedHat now ships with a thread-safe X so that they
can use GTK and Gnome (which use threads quite a bit).

There may be other limitations, however, as I haven't tried to do any
threaded GUI programming, especially on a recent RedHat (I'm using a
patched/hacked RH 4.1 system). RedHat 6.0 may even ship with a threaded
Python, but I dunno...

-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/