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On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 09:37:08AM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:

> >the target audience for perl-threads is very, very small, and
> >historically perl without threads has been much more stable than perl
> >with thread support.
>=20
> 	Is that cross platform, or just related to our native threads?

not related to NetBSD native threads - I haven't used perl58-thread on
NetBSD yet, but threaded perl has been known to be very buggy on at
least some platforms in the past, including Solaris. whether or not this
is still true I don't know. if it works well on NetBSD/i386, good - but
please make it per OPSYS :) (or MACHINE_ARCH for the case of NetBSD? do
some ports still have known pthread bugs?)

however, threaded perl is almost guaranteed to run more slowly than
unthreaded perl, and doesn't offer any advantage to 99% of applications.
whether it is justifyable to make threaded perl the default is a
different question. I think we can come up with something that doesn't
mean slowing down everyone's perl for the sake of a few packages which
have lessened functionality without threaded perl. :)

> 	The four obvious options we have are:
> 	- Default to perl58-threads on NetBSD-2.0
> 	- Make p5-GD depend on perl58-thread, which makes for a nasty
> 	  surprise when someone installs the non threaded perl then
> 	  has to delete it and replace with perl58-thread (which by
> 	  default would involve them reinstalling all dependant packages)
> 	  when they want to install p5-GD.

pkgviews can also help here, but we're not all there yet :)

> 	- Remove freetype support from p5-GD

I guess you have to make p5-GD not build w/ freetype support if perl58
(nothreads) is already installed. maybe it can be optional, enabled if
the default perl for your platform is -threads or if you already have
-threads installed, disabled otherwise..? with a big fat MESSAGE..

grant.


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