Re: Upcoming Debian Releases

[Rob Browning <osiris@cs.utexas.edu>]

Steve Dunham <dunham@dunham.tcimet.net> writes:

> I believe that libc6 is comes with linuxthreads and by default
> compiles to be threadsafe where possible (and provides thread-safe
> versions of functions where thread-safe conflicts with ANSI/POSIX).

It's more complicated than that.  To really be able to compile
threaded programs you have to not only have a thread safe libc, which
we now do, but have to also have every library that you want to call
from the threaded app compiled with -D_REENTRANT.  (I'm speaking about
LinuxThreads now, which is what I think we should standardize on (have
we?), not MIT pthreads.)

It should probably become official Debian policy that all shared
libraries be compiled with -D_REENTRANT.  That, or we'll have to
provide a separate "thread-safe" version of every one.

I think someone did some informal testing when this came up earlier,
and found that the overhead of doing this seemed negligible.

We've had to compile local versions of the libg++, lesstif, and the X
libraries here so that we can program safely with threads.

Thanks
-- 
Rob


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