On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 10:50:39AM -0500, Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia wrote: > > On Nov 17, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Jack Howarth <howa...@bromo.med.uc.edu> wrote: > > > Joshua, > > Do you realize that https://trac.macports.org/changeset/99712 broke all > > tcl/tk software that uses software like blt which uses fork() without exec() > > like blt... > > > > http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-tickets/2012-July/115001.html > > So in other words, software which was broken before the update is still > broken after it. > > The only code that should fork without exec is code that is written by people > who really really really understand what they're doing (and those people know > not to do it). fork() without exec() is just not safe on our platform. Fix > blt. > > > If you are going to make a rash change like this, please warn the other > > developers so we can attempt to limit the breakage in our packages. > > We shouldn't cater to broken code at the expense of flexibility. I support > jmr's changes. blt is broken and should be fixed. > > --Jeremy
Jeremy, I would think, as the X11 maintainer, you would show more sensitivity on this issue rather than just to declare software that uses blt such as pymol as being DOA. The situation with thread support on tcl/tk is known to be suboptimal.. http://wiki.tcl.tk/1339 Vendors like Redhat solved this as described in... https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=478961 by providing both a non-threaded and threaded tcl package. This is exactly the solution we had prior to r99712 where the default package didn't support threads or CoreFoundation (which drags in threads) but both were available in the threads and corefoundation variants. The change in r99712 makes little sense as it leaves the now redundant corefoundation variant in place. It should have at the very least converted the corefoundation variant into a no-corefoundation variant so as to not leave blt users (and other such packages that use fork() in tha manner) stranded. Jack _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev