[Python-Dev] Import lock considered mysterious (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Fri Jul 22 14:48:58 CEST 2011

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:29:23 +1200 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

This whole episode seems to have resulted from a collision between two rather obscure things: that import statements involve locking things, and that some fairly innocuous looking calls, such as s.encode('ascii'), can trigger an import.

Indeed.

I'm wondering whether anything can be done to make problems like this less likely to occur, or at least to make the cause more readily apparent. One shouldn't really have to use gdb to track down bugs in Python code.

See http://bugs.python.org/issue9260

There's a patch there but it needs additional sophistication to remove deadlocks when doing concurrent circular imports.

Regards

Antoine.

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