Bug#475101: obsolete linuxthreads requirement

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be> writes:

> So it looks to me that _REENTRANT is only used to make some functions
> like getlogin_r available.

I believe that's correct, and the discussion at the last DebConf reached
the same conclusion.  I think this bit in Policy is obsolete.  I already
closed a Lintian bug about it a while back.

You may separately need _REENTRANT to get prototypes, but using the right
feature test macros to get prototypes is a completely different issue and
I don't think we need to leave this in Policy just for that (otherwise,
we'd need to talk about GNU_SOURCE and whatnot as well, and I don't see a
need to go there right now).

> I think that libraries in Debian should never change behaviour based on
> _REENTRANT.  If a library can be build to either support threads or not,
> it should be compiled to support threads.  It might also want to provide
> one that does and one that doesn't so that you can link to either one,
> but I would like to discourage that, and the default library should be
> the one that supports threads.  And if it does provide 2 libraries, the
> header files for both should be the same and not depend on _REENTRANT.

I think I agree.  Could someone propose a wording change to Policy to say
what we really mean here rather than focusing on _REENTRANT?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>