Re: Threads

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 12:37:19AM +0100, Roberto Diaz wrote:
> Yes.. all this looks very nice.. but if the way people develop hurd is
> like linux.. then I cant give up since now... they are an exoteric sect
> where no new members are welcome since a lot of time...
> 
> I hope to be wrong...

The problem is not what the Hurd people think. The problem is that many
people have little time at hands to play around with new ideas. For example,
a bug report with a patch gets a higher priority than some new revolutionary
design idea.

What you proposed has little to do with the Hurd itself. The Hurd could make
use of such a functionality and replace threads usage with your new thing if
it existed. But it doesn't, so we don't worry about it. Implementing such is
not the focus of the Hurd project at all.

Also, it doesn't do away with the need for pthreads support. For one,
pthreads is a portable standard, and as such quite useful for applications,
and applications will use them. Our goal is not to convert everybody to our
own way of thinking, but to enable everyone to build on top of the Hurd. So,
pthreads is still needed to compile applications like the Gnome DE.

We can talk when your new stuff is implemented and integrated in gcc, gdb
etc. Then we can consider if we want to use that or stick with cthreads or
pthreads. Until then, you will find that around here there is not much
interest in such things as in any other place were threads are used.

But to address your concern. The Hurd maintainers are very picky about code
they accept into the tree. But we welcome any good code, from any source, as
long as it's free (requires a copyright assignment usually). However, the
design of the Hurd allows for people to implement servers using the Hurd
libraries without being controlled by a closed group.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de