svn commit: r189828 - in head: include sys/sys

Robert Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Fri Mar 20 15:17:03 PDT 2009


On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Coleman Kane wrote:

> I've found that many of the GNU apps are notorious for this. I really can't 
> say that I know why libassuan or gnupg explicitly require GNU pth, rather 
> than first attempting to use POSIX pthread API. Their configure scripts both 
> want to search for and run pth-config, and fail to enable some sort of 
> threaded features if it doesn't exist. I already tried removing pth stuff 
> from both port Makefiles to see what would happen. I didn't spend much time 
> on it after I figured out that devel/pth would just work if I removed the 
> signal.h include.
>
> I am guessing that some non-standard extensions which GNU pth provides are 
> not provided by the normal POSIX spec.
>
> In fact, libassuan just goes ahead and uses a bunch of pth_* overrides for 
> dealing with them in a thread-safe manner (waitpid, read, write, select, 
> usleep).

Historically, pthreads implementations were highly variable in quality, 
completeness, etc.  It wouldn't surprise me if the persistence of applications 
linking against pth isn't, in part, a response to that (now-historic) 
situation.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge


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