Mailing-List: contact dev-help@apr.apache.org; run by ezmlm
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Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 04:05:30 +0200
From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@samba-tng.org>
To: Howard Chu <hyc@highlandsun.com>
Cc: tng-technical@samba-tng.org, freedce-dev@lists.dcerpc.net,
	samba-technical@samba.org, samba-ntdom@samba.org,
	cifs@discuss.microsoft.com, dev@apr.apache.org
Subject: Re: [xad] TNG services and FreeDCE development
Message-ID: <20011009040530.D5242@angua.rince.de>
Mail-Followup-To: Howard Chu <hyc@highlandsun.com>,
	tng-technical@samba-tng.org, freedce-dev@lists.dcerpc.net,
	samba-technical@samba.org, samba-ntdom@samba.org,
	cifs@discuss.microsoft.com, dev@apr.apache.org
References: <20011009014844.F1449@angua.rince.de>
 <001d01c1505f$0db893c0$7601a8c0@fiddle.symas.com>
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In-Reply-To: <001d01c1505f$0db893c0$7601a8c0@fiddle.symas.com>;
 from hyc@highlandsun.com on Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 06:09:32PM -0700

On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 06:09:32PM -0700, Howard Chu wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-xad@PADL.COM [mailto:owner-xad@PADL.COM]On Behalf Of Luke
> > Kenneth Casson Leighton
> 
> > development time estimates for TNG / dcerpc.net project tasks
> >
> > dcethreads:
> >
> > portability rewrite       50? (to use Apache Runtime Library for
> > preference)
> > pthreads rewrite         200? (2nd preference: cut out dcethreads)
> 
> Can you give me a bit more detail on this? In particular, I need to decide
> whether to try to port freedce to Solaris or get Sun's commercial DCE
> implementation
> instead, and try to make it all play together. What is the issue with the
> current dcethreads code? (I haven't looked at the freedce source tree yet.)

the current dcethreads library is an addition to the suite
of POSIX draft 4 emulation libraries, and the original focus
of dcethreads was to add to that suite w.r.t linux, which
was _not_ included, as linux wasn't _around_ when OSF started
DCE :)

so you may find that you don't need dcethreads, you may be
able to #define SOLARIS and compile from there, and not even
_use_ dcethreads.  you'll have to check the code.

dcethreads is a user-space emulation library on top of
sigsetjmp and siglongjump.  it is horrible, but it works.

personally, as i am doing this development without funding
at present, and my skills are on NT / unix interoperability,
as long as i have _a_ library, and _a_ platform on which
that library works, i am not the best person to ask w.r.t.
getting other OSes to work: i'll focus on the common bits
in my area of expertise.

i do, however, know of, and have been gently encouraging,
some other people to develop, relace or rewrite dcethreads,
plus there _is_ a possibility to do away with dcethreads
and use modern posix threads instead.

the disadvantage of that is that we lose thread cancellation,
which POSIX draft 4, and therefore dcethreads, provides.

given that most OSes don't support thread cancellation
without some sort of problems such as instability and
memory loss in the kernel (i.e. solaris), that's not such
a big deal.

luke.