Re: Fix for back-shell child process deadlocks (ITS#2262)

[simon.brady@otago.ac.nz]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:

> There is one major caveat... such "fixes" are inherently non-portable.

Could you please expand on this? The fix makes simple use of the standard 
ldap_pvt_thread_mutex type, in (AFAIK) the same way it's used in other 
backends, so it seems to me it's no less portable than the entire thread 
support: if platform X can't handle this patch, it probably can't handle 
threads at all in which case the whole issue is irrelevant.

Or am I missing something?

> So, given that the intent of back-shell is for demonstration and
> prototyping, it's likely we will not incorporate your suggestion.

I was about to respond that back-shell has filled a very important niche
for us in production services, but I guess you're saying we should be
using a new, smarter backend like back-perl or back-meta? That makes
sense, but I suspect I'm far from the only one using back-shell beyond
what it was intended for - I can understand how you'd rather be putting
your resources into the new backends, but I still feel this fix is good 
for people not ready to transition to 2.1.

Still, it's your call.

> It's documented in slap-shell(5) in the current "stable" release (2.1.12).
> Also, configure now warns if both --enable-shell and --with-threads are
> enabled.

Good to hear - thanks.

--
Simon Brady                             mailto:simon.brady@otago.ac.nz
ITS Technical Services
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand