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Message-ID: <012a01c0c0f1$baf65110$0200a8c0@lifelesswks>
From: "Robert Collins" <robert DOT collins AT itdomain DOT com DOT au>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
References: <EA18B9FA0FE4194AA2B4CDB91F73C0EF79B9 AT itdomain002 DOT itdomain DOT net DOT au> <3AD1A64D DOT 7DC36DF0 AT mip DOT sdu DOT dk>
Subject: contribution soapbox(was Re: G++ guru's please comment - Re: FW: pthread_create problem in Cygwin  1.1.8-2])
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 22:36:40 +1000
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X-OriginalArrivalTime: 09 Apr 2001 12:30:11.0187 (UTC) FILETIME=[D1DB5430:01C0C0F0]

Rene, this isn't pointed at you! I just reread my reply and I realised
I'd missed an IMO important point.

----- Original Message -----
From: "René Møller Fonseca" <fonseca AT mip DOT sdu DOT dk>


> Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> The problem, as I understand it, is that gcc is not built with thread
> support which is required for exception handling to work in a
> multithreaded environment. Unfortunately the thread support has not
been
> ported to the win32 api. I suspect functionality like "pthread_once"
to
> be required (tricky to implement).

Guys, Girls, secret service agents,

Contributing to cygwin is not hard. In fact it's dead easy. The biggest
obstacle is perception. All you need are basic C++ (even straight C will
do if you're a hacker or just willing to try new things) skills, and a
small target.

(Non-coders, you are hereby off the coding hook, and onto the why don't
you contribute your knowledge in the form of feedback on documentation -
something every open source project can use more of).

I strongly suspect that most of you coders out there are guilty of the
thought "Gee it would be nice if cygwin had feature foo, but I [wouldn't
know where to start to fix it|I don't have the time to contribute] so
I'll just spend hours now working around the lack of foo".

I am guilty of that thought. Then one day I got tired of the the fact
that I couldn't built squid with thread support, so I ported the thread
code to win32 threads. During that port I realised just how thin a layer
cygwin is over win32 - it's hardly there at all. So I threw out the
win32 threads code, and fixed up what was missing in Cygwin. That core
fixup took me about twice as long as porting the original code, but I
can reuse the fixedup cygwin code to port other applications with
greater ease.

The follow-up to that spurt of coding was that I got tired of the
lamentations about threads and cygwin and started fixing the entire
thread support... In fact I've now been labelled the pthreads
maintainer, which as far as I can tell means that you lot are now
*allowed* to complain about pthreads!

I want to ask you all to do something for cygwin (and I have no right to
ask this, but I'm going to anyway): The next time you work around a bug
in cygwin when porting an application, put aside 2 hours (thats all
you'll need for most things). Download the cygwin source via CVS. (The
documentation is accurate). Build it. Add your feature, or a tweak to an
existing feature, or even just the outline code to return ENOSYS - no
supported for the relevant function call. Send that in with a Changelog.
You've now become a contributor, and saved yourself sending in a patch
to the application developers for cygwin compatability, all by changing
cygwin. And in future, chances are someone else will add to what you've
done, and finish off your partial code, or tweak it even more.

Rob.

P.S. To support my claim about perception being the issue, here is the
code for the diffucult function pthread_once.

int
__pthread_once (pthread_once_t * once_control, void (*init_routine)
(void))
{
  if (*once_control!=PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT)
    init_routine();
  *once_control=!PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT;
  return 0;
}

And most of the cygwin internal functions are not much longer.




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