[Chandler-dev] float('1.0') failing occasionally in French locale

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:07 AM 9/13/2006 -0700, Andi Vajda wrote:
>If PyLucene never released the GIL then the system would appear to hang 
>temporarily when, for example, optimizing indexes which can take several 
>seconds (or more).
>
>Also, since one can write python extensions to PyLucene, it can call back 
>into python. Because of this and because acquiring the GIL is not 
>re-entrant - Phillip, correct me if I'm wrong - the GIL has to be acquired 
>or released anytime the Python / C++ boundary is crossed.

Not really.  You *can* release the GIL in order to allow Python code to run 
alongside you, but there is no requirement that you do so.  Normally, 
releasing the GIL is something that happens only when waiting for I/O or 
doing calculations that may run for an extended period.  So, it certainly 
makes sense to release it in the PyLucene case, but it's not a requirement 
that all C or C++ code must follow.

But regarding the locale issue, the hard part is that the problem doesn't 
appear to be reproducible in a reliable way, so confirming *anything* about 
the problem is virtually impossible.