-> Kriston has mentioned that there are problems with exec in a multithreaded -> environment, mostly in reference to using CGI; still if they're present at -> that level, I'd expect they're also present for Tcl's exec command. I'm -> not sure what the problems are, but I can imagine some issues (signal -> handling is a tricky business in threaded apps, for example). -> -> Another way to approach your problem would be to implement the Glimpse -> interface as an external database driver. AOLserver is good about taking -> care of the processes it executes to spin off db proxies (hmmm...wonder -> why there's no trouble there, but there's trouble in CGI...note to self: -> possible line of investigation there). You could write a DB proxy that -> accepts a Glimpse query, runs it, and returns the result as a single -> column in a single row. I've done this for other external interfaces. If -> Glimpse has a daemon process to which you can connect and run queries, -> that's even better, because then you can take advantage of AOLserver -> connection pooling. -> -> Sorry I don't have an answer for exec, but the db proxy is one avenue you -> might be able to explore.
A while back I wrote a glimpse client in Python that worked fairly well (I found glimpse itself to be quite a hack, but that's a different story ;). You can take advantage of connection pooling etc., but you'd have to install Python & PyWX. OTOH you could probably get me to write a little Tcl wrapper for the Python module, or just read the Python code (which is quite short, as I recall!) and write the client yourself in Tcl. The code is at http://www.idyll.org/~t/www-tools/, near the bottom. --titus, who has spent considerable time writing things to avoid exec'ing in AOLserver ;).
