[SQL-Ledger] Re: Questions Re sql-ledger debian package

[Niko Tyni]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:18:48AM -0700, Izzy Blacklock wrote:

> >I am not entirely sure what the technical problem is but it has
> >something to do with variable reassignment in loops, and properly
> >thought-out scoping fixes the problem.  The problem seems to occur
> >when a variable (usually in my experience, a reference) is freed at
> >the end of the loop but still implicitly in the current scope until
> >some time later.  At that point you get an error echoed.  This is a
> >bug but probably not a very high priority one for the Perl team
> >because, quite frankly, no sane code would ever trigger it.

This sounds much like 

 http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=50142

which is also referenced by the initial message in

 http://bugs.debian.org/503832

Quoting Dave Mitchell in the the first one:

-----------
  The bug itself has always been present, because items pushed onto the
  stack aren't reference counted, and so can get prematurely freed.
  Perl has just got better at detecting this and panicing rather than
  ploughing on..
-----------

> >>At the end of the day, I need a functioning sql-ledger and right know it
> >>looks like that means I need to compile perl without threads.  According to
> >>Dieter this is a problem for other projects as well, so maybe there is a
> >>need to provide a debian package of perl without threads.

I wonder if it really is related to threads support at all.  FWIW, I
see the same panic on Perl 5.11.4 without threads with the testcase from
[perl #50142]:

#!perl
@ARGV = qw(foo);
foo(@ARGV);
sub foo { my $x = shift(@ARGV); my $y = shift; }
__END__

Is there any evidence that sql-ledger works better on a non-threaded than
a threaded Perl 5.10.x ?
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org