Re: Linux and -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS

At 12:47 -0500 12/19/03, Al Tobey wrote:
>I was looking at using Thread::Status to work on some problems with one
>of my threaded applications, but it requires Thread::Signal, which
>currently only works on perls compiled with -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS.

Actually, the latest Thread::Signal does its own check to find out 
whether threads have pids or not and does not check Config.pm for 
-DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS .


>...  I'm
>running Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0 with a custom compiled perl, where
>I removed that flag because it no longer is true.

You mean to say that ./configure didn't detect the 
-DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS flag correctly?  If that's the case, the simplest 
way to report this would be to use perlbug.


>Two things:  Can Thread::Status be made to work without Thread::Signal

If you can tell me a way to execute an arbitrary subroutine in a Perl 
thread, triggered by something outside of that thread, I'd be glad to 
adapt Thread::Signal to this.  If it would have to be in C, that's 
probably ok as well.  Being able to have a subroutine called at will 
is just _the_ capability you need.  Otherwise you'd get into polling 
schemes such as using an alarm() with a very small value, which would 
interfere with any other alarms being set, etc. etc.


>and would you know whom to contact about making perl properly detect the
>THREADS_HAVE_PIDS status?

Submit a bug report to p5p with perlbug (a script that comes with any 
Perl installation).


>Almost all modern Linux distributions will have this problem, with the
>exception of Slackware (which will probably be there soon).

Unfortunately, not many people consider this a problem.  I'm glad 
someone else finds this to be a problem as well.



Liz