Re: [patches] [PATCH] fix build with linuxthreads

[Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joseph S. Myers a écrit :
> On Sun, 1 Mar 2009, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> The patch below fixes a problem that appears when using EGLIBC with
>> linuxthreads. The linuxthreads version of __libc_lock_lock and 
> 
> Why are you using Linuxthreads?  Nightly imports of Linuxthreads from FSF 
> CVS stopped a long time ago, and it won't be possible to build any EGLIBC 
> version later than 2.5 without TLS support unless you apply a lot of local 
> patches to work around the lack of such support; if you have TLS support 
> for your target, using Linuxthreads instead of NPTL hardly makes sense.

We (Debian) are using it for a few architectures that have TLS support
but not yet (full) NPTL support:
- hppa: it has NPTL support, but with a different ABI. We are waiting
for a compatibility layer using symbol versioning before doing the
transition to NPTL (in development)
- GNU/kFreeBSD i386 and x86_64: we also plan to change the threading
library sooner or later, but currently we haven't decided how to do that.

> I'd have thought the right thing to do is to remove Linuxthreads from 
> /trunk and /fsf/trunk to make clear it is no longer a useful part of 
> EGLIBC.

FSF has also declared linuxthreads dead, but the fact is that modulo a
few patches, and as long as you have TLS support, it still works
correctly with glibc 2.9 and above.

I don't think EGLIBC should officially supports linuxthreads, but having
this kind of small patch applied won't hurd EGLIBC and would help those
still using linuxthreads.

OTOH I would totally understand that you choose to not apply such a patch.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno	                        GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien@xxxxxxxxxxx                 http://www.aurel32.net