On Friday, June 20, 2003, at 04:40  PM, wulf@ping.net.au wrote:

> I don't believe that it is a problem of finding volunteers willing to
> spend time on this, but a lack on the number of volunteers that have 
> the
> knowledge and expertise on this matter.
>
> Don't you agree?

No, I don't.  While I don't expect everyone to be an expert, I do 
expect a little more effort that I seem to be seeing.

The pthread library has a number of debugging options.  There is a 
debug log that you can run a dmesg-like program on to get pretty 
detailed information on every action the library takes.  There are also 
various application debugging options (note that a fair number of 
things that were blamed on libpthread at first turned out to be bugs in 
the applications!).

When people see failures, they should use the tools at their disposal 
to get as much information as possible about the failure.  You don't 
have to be an expert in how the SA/pthreads system works to do this.

I know of one person (Bill Studenmund, an expert in a number of areas, 
but whom I suspect will not claim to be an expert in how SA/pthreads 
works :-) who has had great success at getting pthreads bugs fixed by 
providing very thorough debugging information to Nathan when he has a 
problem.

         -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>