Fixing -pthreads (Re: ports and -current)

[Daniel Eischen]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Loren James Rittle wrote:

> > I'm all for removing it, but our FSF GCC maintainer thought
> > it better to make it a NOOP.  We're just going by his advice.
> 
> I agreed that making -pthread == NOOP was probably better than the
> ~Sept 5 -CURRENT system compiler however that was not my full advice.
> 
> In my view (and thus my advice), it is the stated collective opinion
> of the FSF gcc development team that -pthread should exist for all gcc
> ports which support POSIX threads.  This is true even if not well
> documented.  It would be best if adding the switch actually implied
> everything to support threads.
> 
> If adding the -pthread switch is a NOOP to gcc but users could later
> add (e.g.): LD_PRELOAD=libc_r.so (or one of the newer choices) and not
> break anything, then I think that would be fully acceptable and meet
> the specification of the switch.  This would be very cool in that you
> could test/run against multiple thread libraries without a re-link.

Yes, and I agree.  If someone were to tell me how to implement
that, I would do it.  If it is just a matter of adding some missing
pthread interfaces as stubs to libc, then it is pretty simple.

> If adding the -pthread switch is a NOOP to gcc but users must also add
> -lc_r (or one of the newer choices) for correct operation, then I
> think making it a NOOP is a bad idea and I attempted to state so.

Well, if they don't use LD_PRELOAD=libc_r.so or whatever and
try to run the application, it isn't going to work very well
using pthread stubs.

-- 
Dan Eischen