Re: Maintainers, porters, and burden of porting

[Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net>]

On 31/08/11 at 12:58 +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 11:57 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> [...]
> > But a different thread library that has clear POSIX compliance bugs[*]
> > is the kind of things that make me fear that many more packages than we
> > see currently are broken on kfreebsd. And I'm not sure that it's where
> > we want to spend our manpower.
> > 
> > [*] due to linuxthreads: #639658 [kfreebsd] waitpid from a thread does
> > not work for child processes created by other threads.
> > there's also some signals+thread fun.
> 
> Of course, Linux had those bugs for many years, so most multithreaded
> programs that run on Linux are probably tolerant of them.

But Linux hasn't had them since many years too (NPTL in Debian: 2003),
so multithreaded programs that were written more recently might not be
so tolerant.

If I remember correctly, hppa was using linuxthreads too when it was in
Debian. Are there other ports in that case (e.g on debian-ports.org)?

One problem with linuxthreads is that it can be hard to convince
upstream to apply patches for it, when the only reason for needing those
patches is that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has POSIX compliance bugs.

L.