Tim Peters wrote at 2004-5-23 14:46 -0400:
... Not blocking signals that should not be blocks according to PThreads standard ...
Moreover, I doubt that such problems will be significant in practise:
As above, the original signal-blocking patch was added for reasons "in practice" that appeared sufficient at the time. If you want to argue that, the right (helpful) place to do so is in a comment attached to the bug report.
You have snipped my explanation why I am convinced that the patch can only improve things! I have not argued that there was no case to block *some* signals, just not the ones that the operating system uses to signal major problems -- SIGSEGV, SIGBUS, ... and friends. The patch states that the pthreads standard says that such signals should not be blocked. This is a Python issue independent of the bug in LinuxThreads.
... An alternative to maintaining your own Python, and/or your own Linux, is to move to the current Linux thread implementation (NPTL), which doesn't have the LinuxThread signal bug that's the deeper cause of Zope's problems (on Linux boxes using LinuxThreads).
Our system administrators have been sceptical to switch to NPTL support. They say, there are still some problems about it. I will reraise the question and see what my colleagues feel as the less problematic way: use NPTL or our own Python version. -- Dieter