Re: is --enable-threads supported on HP-UX 11.00?

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Jun 25, 2001, Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> wrote:

> --On Saturday, June 23, 2001 04:29:46 AM -0300 Alexandre Oliva
> <aoliva@redhat.com> wrote:


>> On Jun 21, 2001, Loren James Rittle <rittle@latour.rsch.comm.mot.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> I personally think that anyone that configures with just
>>> --enable-threads should get a fatal ``early configuration''-time
>>> warning when single is the best that can be done for a platform.
>> 
>> I would go with a warning, but I'd rather not have a fatal error.  It
>> would be quite annoying to have to remember which platforms support
>> threading and which don't, so that I could omit --enable-threads when
>> testing GCC on them.

> I think this is a classic case of different perspectives implying
> different things.  We are not typical users, and so we have different
> wants than them.

> Our goal is not to make our lives easy -- it is to make our users
> lives easy.  If I download software, and it says "use --enable-threads
> to enable threads", and I do that, and it doesn't actually set itself
> up to use threads, and the only way I knew that is that a warning
> was emitted somewhere in the midst of several hundred lines of output,
> I'm going to not even notice.  Then, I'll wonder why either a) threads
> don't work, or b) things that should be thread-safe aren't.  Or, worse
> yet, I'll ship software that's broken, and finally someone will notice,
> and that will reflect poorly on GCC.

This could be the case if the OS actually supported some thread
library, but GCC didn't.  I don't know of any OS for which this is the
case.  In general, GCC will only implicitly disable threads when the
OS doesn't support any thread library at all.  In this case,
--enable-threads is totally pointless, and may be safely ignored,
IMO.  The user won't be able to tell it didn't work, because there's
no way to test it (other than gcc -v, of course).

> We should also make the defaults right for the platforms in use.
> (Same idea: if GNU/Linux supports threads, why would I want an
> un-threadsafe compiler?  Why should I as the user have to figure
> this out?)

Agreed.  Then, --disable-threads would always make sense.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me