[IPython-dev] Nice segfault from package scanning...

[Fernando Perez]

On 4/25/07, Ville M. Vainio <vivainio at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/25/07, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In [4]: import matp
> >
> > [Standby while scanning modules, this can take a while]
>
> You shouldn't see this! It's a message from the old import completer.
> Please verify that you are running on the latest ipy_completers.py.

Yup, I was surprised that I couldn't find that message by grepping the sources.

Unfortunately, what happened is that I recently upgraded my laptop to
Ubuntu Feisty, and when I typed that message I was inadvertedly
running the Feisty IPython, not SVN.  It appears that this misfeature
was long enough in our tree that it got picked up by the official
Feisty IPython (and possibly the Debian one).

This is bad: we're quickly going to pick up a really bad rep if Ubuntu
users (a good chunk of the desktop linux population) get a long wait
and a segfault on every TAB after 'import'.  Let's see if we can
convince the Debian/Ubuntu maintainers to treat this as a bug and fix
it.

Can anyone volunteer to make a small  patch for this and contact the
ubuntu maintainer?  It's easy, just disabling that completer is more
or less all we need.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced even the new, safer package
tab-completion should be enabled by default.  When used over NFS when
your $PYTHONPATH contains many NFS-mounted directories (or other
network filesystems), it is very slow.  Having your session freeze for
a long time just because you hit the tab key isn't very good.

Thouhgts?

f