[sane-devel] pros and cons regarding --enable-pthread for Linux

[Chris Bagwell]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 5:45 AM, Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On Aug 26 20:41 m. allan noah wrote:
>>
>> Pthread is the default on other platforms because they generally don't
>> let open usb device handles pass across a fork(). Since this works on
>> Linux, and threads were so flaky all those years ago, non-threaded
>> became the default for Linux. Honestly, I think it could be changed,
>> but I don't think pthread is as well tested, since most user's use
>> whatever their distro compiles :)
>
> Then a question to the Linux distribution people on this list is
> whether or not there is perhaps already a Linux distribution
> which compiles sane-backends with the non-default configure
> setting "--enable-pthread".
>
> Or was this perhaps done in the past but because of
> whatever issues it was changed back to the default?
>

I know Fedora does not enable pthreads... but I do not know if its
intentional.  I think a lot of distributions assume disabled features
are that way for a reason and don't bother with enabling them to much
unless issues like this come up.

Chris