Gustaf, AFAIK that behavior is neither intended nor desirable, it's a
bug. (I think
all the APM code pre-dates AOLserver 4.x,
which might have something to do with the problem.)
Btw, in AOLserver 4.0.10 but without OpenACS, I do spawn
detached threads from tcl/*.tcl files during AOLserver startup, and
those detached threads do have all my custom Tcl procs defined. So
whatever is going on with your problem, it sounds like it's probably
specific to OpenACS.
A related problem is the "reload changed files" feature from the
OpenACS APM. It can re-load changed Tcl procs, but it does so
only in AOLserver connection threads - other threads, like
the scheduler thread, see new procs only if you restart AOLserver.
That's probably fixable by simply changing that feature to use
ns_eval
instead of its current and ancient method of hooking into the OpenACS
request processor. That's been
discussed before
but AFAIK no one has actually tried it.
