Re: Bug#565675: ITP: pthsem -- pth replacement with semaphore support

[Martin Koegler <mkoegler@auto.tuwien.ac.at>]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:48:24AM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Martin Koegler, le Tue 19 Jan 2010 09:27:07 +0100, a écrit :
> > Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> wrote:
> > > Marc Leeman, le Sun 17 Jan 2010 22:16:17 +0100, a écrit :
> > > > * Package name    : pthsem
> > > 
> > > Mmm, could this perhaps rather be just a patch added to the existing pth
> > > package?  Else you'll have to share the Debian patches.
> > 
> > The situation with GNU pth is:
> 
> I guessed so, but still.
> 
> The problem is that people know pth, but they don't know pthsem (yet).
> It will be a long time before people discover that there is a new
> interesting pthsem package that basically does the same as pth with
> quite a few extra features, is not dead etc.  Why not just replacing the
> existing pth package with pthsem to avoid that delay?

pth and pthsem can be installed in parallel, as they use different
filenames (pth.h+libpth.so* / pthsem.h/libpthsem.so*). Both packages
use the same symol names in their libraries.

The libpthsem-compat provides/conflicts libpth-dev. It contains stub
files for pth.m4, pth.h and pth-config, which "redirect" to the pthsem
files. Software built with libpthsem-compat installed will link
against libpthsem.

My intention was not to replace pth, but to provide a migration path.

> Were I Martin Kögler, I'd even just request GNU to become the new
> maintainer of pth.

I must admit, that I have not read anything about GNU maintainers, but
GNU has usually a bigger "philosophical overhead". 

I need pthsem, so I only want a working version with all features I
need.

Regards,
Martin Kögler