On 10 Jan 2003 at 15:00, Thomas Heller wrote:
"Gordon McMillan" <gmcm@hypernet.com> writes: [...]
Installer freezes in-process COM servers. It does so by using a generic shim dll which gets renamed for each component. Basically, this dll will forward most of the calls on to Mark's PythoncomXX.dll. But it wants to install import hooks. [...] I cannot really believe this. Isn't it the same as for normal, unfrozen inprocess COM servers?
No. COM always loads pythoncom22 in that case. Note that a Python22 app can load a frozen Python21 COM server just fine.
The shim dll could do the same as pythoncom22.dll does, or even rely on it to do the right thing.
That's what it tries to do. It loads pythoncomXX.dll and forwards all the calls it can.
Unfrozen inproc COM works whether the main process is Python or not.
Yes, pythoncom doesn't install import hooks.
... so can't install it's import hooks into the right one.
IMO, it's the frozen DLL rendering the Python environment unusable for everything else (the main process, for example).
I don't understand that statement at all. Working with a (same version) Python app is actually a secondary worry. I'm more bothered that, for example, Excel can't load 2 frozen servers which use the same Python.
I hope using the frozen module mechanism instead of import hooks will make this more tolerant.
But where are those modules frozen? How do they get installed in the already running Python? What if mulitple sets of frozen modules (with dups) want to install themselves?
All this may of course be off-topic for this thread.
It ties into Martin's earlier comments about threading models. It may be that the solution lies in using COM's apartment threading, instead of free threading. That way, the COM server could have it's own interpreter state, and the calls would end up in the right interpreter. Maybe. But I don't understand the COM part well enough, and Mark's stuff supports free threading, not apartment threading. I really brought all this up to try to widen the scope from extension modules which can easily grab an interpreter state and hold onto it. -- Gordon http://www.mcmillan-inc.com/