r...@cs.hut.fi (Riku Saikkonen) writes:
> It appears that threads are disabled in the Debian package of
> guile-1.8. There are some references to this in
> /usr/share/doc/guile-1.8/changelog.Debian.gz, but otherwise this does
> not seem to be documented anywhere. I think it should be documented in
> a README.Debian, since this is a Debian-specific change to how Guile
> works by default: /usr/share/doc/guile-1.8-doc/NEWS.gz lines 321-322
> say that pthreads are on by default if the platform has them.
>
> Guile itself does not give a very helpful error message when I try to
> use threads:
>
> $ guile
> guile> (call-with-new-thread (lambda () 1))
>
> Backtrace:
> In standard input:
> 1: 0* [call-with-new-thread #<procedure #f ()>]
>
> standard input:1:1: In procedure call-with-new-thread in expression
> (call-with-new-thread (lambda () 1)):
> standard input:1:1: Function not implemented
> ABORT: (system-error)
> guile>
>
> It took me quite a while to get from "Function not implemented" to
> discovering that the Debian package has threads disabled, so a
> Debian-specific documentation of the change would be very useful.
Can you say specifically what you'd like to see happen instead?
Unless you only mean documentation in a Debian-specific file, I don't
see why it should be Debian-specific. For example, perhaps we
(upstream) could change that error message to add "because Guile was
built without threads support".
> (Of course, another possibility would be to re-enable threads. But,
> reading only the changelog entries, I don't quite understand why
> threads are now disabled: the reason for disabling them was "to avoid
> a thread-related bug" and it "should be a temporary measure" as of
> September 2006.)
The thread-related bug was complicated (to do with locked mutexes and
forking), and I understand that it would also be complicated (because
of ABI compatibility) to re-enable threads within the series of
guile-1.8 packages. I think our best hope in practice is just to make
sure that we have threads enabled (and all working!) again in the next
major Guile release (2.0, expected sometime this year).
Regards,
Neil (upstream Guile maintainer)
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