Disable automatic garbage collection in notebooks, as it can interfere with tracing

Author: andreas-zeller

notebooks/ReleaseNotes.ipynb

@@ -23,7 +23,9 @@
     "## Current Version (in progress)\n",
     "\n",
     "This is the version we are preparing for the next release (e.g. what you get when you check out the latest version from [the GitHub repo](__GITHUB_HTML__)).\n",
-    "Major changes will show up here as we make them."
+    "Major changes will show up here as we make them.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "* In notebooks under Python 3.12, automatic garbage collection would cause a method `_clean_thread_parent_frames()` to be executed with certain functions, interfering with tracing and dynamic analysis. This is now disabled."
    ]
   },
   {

notebooks/shared/bookutils/setup.py

@@ -1,12 +1,20 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env python
+# Special setup code for fuzzingbook and debuggingbook notebooks
 
-# We set a fixed seed for all notebooks and examples,
-# such that creation is more predictable.
-
+# We set a fixed seed for all notebooks and examples, such that creation
+# is more predictable.
 # Interacting with a notebook (in particular executing cells again and again)
 # will still yield new results every time.
 
 FIXED_SEED = 2001
 
 import random
-random.seed(FIXED_SEED)
+random.seed(FIXED_SEED)
+
+
+# We disable automatic garbage collection for notebooks.
+# As of Python 3.12, automatic gc in iPython may invoke a method
+# _clean_thread_parent_frames(), interfering with tracing.
+
+import gc
+gc.disable()