*BSD News Article 99167


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From: tsmurphy@cs.uiuc.edu (TERENCE MURPHY)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Pthread: Is there a better way?
Date: 8 Jul 1997 01:09:30 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Distribution: world
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:44066

I came across the man page for pthread, exuberant that the package
came with the OS, and wrote a little program to test it, and worried
when it didn't link.  Then I read:

>     By default, libc_r is not built as part of a 'make world'. To build and
>     install, it type:
>
>           cd /usr/src/lib/libc_r
>
>           make depend && make all && make install

I thought <moan> and then...

>     This assumes you have a full source tree below /usr/src and that you have
>     at least installed the header files in the way that 'make world' does.

Ahhh!!!  I seriously don't have the disk space the go out and download
and compile the whole source tree.  There's got to be a better way!  Is
there an alternative binary distribution which includes the threaded
libc?  Are there plans to put threads into the default system in the
future?  That makes sense to me.  Seriously, I don't understand why it
isn't already.  Heck, if it's not included in the standard
distribution, developers are less likely to try to depend on stuff
which people aren't going to have.  I also don't see why SYSVSHM isn't
in the kernel by default.  Otherwise, the kernel is totally usable on
installation (even without a compile)

For system-ish stuff (like threads and shared memory), IMHO, the system
should provide that stuff without requiring a recompile.  I'm a software
engineer, not a system administrator!!  FreeBSD follows this well (much
better than the alternatives) but I think it can be improved.

Thanks, Terry Murphy