thread support in GPGME (was: Re: Bug in gpgme 0.4.2?)

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 05:54:18PM +0200, Albrecht Dre? wrote:
> As I am now almost finished with moving balsa from gpgme 0.3.15 to 0.4.3,  
> I would like to submit the patch for migration soon. Do you have a  
> timeline for releasing gpgme 0.4.3? I guess people would complain if they  
> had to use CVS gpgme, and I want to make 0.4.3 as minumum requirement to  
> avoid endless discussions about missing pub keys not detected correctly.

I have now reworked GPGME's support for thread.  The old autodetect code is
still there for compatibility, but it is deprecated.  Instead, a new library
is built, libgpgme-pthread, which you can use to link against.  This library
links explicitely against libpthread, so libtool will get the ordering
right.

What is still missing is support for that in gpgme-config, which will get a
new option --thread= to select the thread package, and new autoconf macros
AM_PATH_GPGME_PTHREAD (or whatever the name should be).  The same for pth,
by the way.

The libraries libgpgme, libgpgme-pthread, ... are almost identical, they
differ only in a few functions :-/  but the alternative to link all three
against a libgpgme-real library that contains the main code requires to have
the thread support in other libraries (let's call them libgpg-ath,
libgpg-ath-pthread, libgpg-ath-pth), because they'd have to be linked in
_after_ libgpgme-real.  So we would have another stand alone package you
would have to download, compile, install, and maintain.  We thought long
about it, and eventually decided that wasting a bit of disk space is
better than wasting a lot of man power, so this is what we are doing now.

When we have the gpgme-config and AM_ stuff done, and fixed the
documentation, I think it is time for another gpgme release.  That would be
early next week.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus at gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann at ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/