[Edu-sig] Help Testing IDLE patch

[John Zelle]

John Zelle wrote:

> I think my first reply to this went only to David. For others who 
> might be interested, here's the scoop.
>
> The problem folks have been having is that IDLE sometimes loses 
> communication with its subprocess. This can cause IDLE to freeze or be 
> unable to bring the shell window up because the socket is in use. It's 
> hard to recreate exactly what does this, as it seems to be a sporadic 
> (race condition?) problem.
>
> There is a situation where I can reliably cause IDLE to hang. Simply 
> create a program that has an input statement such as: x = 
> input("Testing ")
> Run the program with <F5> and when the prompt "Testing " comes up, 
> close the shell window to go back to the program window. Usually, this 
> will hang IDLE. If it doesn't happen the first time, do <F5> - close 
> again. Versions of IDLE since 1.0 will freeze after 1 or two rounds of 
> this.
>
> My "patch" just does the equivalent of a keyboard interrupt before 
> closing the shell, since I've found that doing a Ctrl-c before closing 
> seems to avoid the problem.
>
> BTW, my fix is for IDLE 1.04 shipped with Python 2.3.3. I don't think 
> it works for IDLE 1.1 in Python 2.4 :-(
>
Quick clarification: This should work with any of the 1.0x IDLEs shipped 
with Python 2.3.x