Re: Gtk+ print support - request for feedback

[Michael Sweet <mike easysw com>]

Morten Welinder wrote:
> > The man page for setlocale() says nothing about thread safety, but
> > given how all of the other standard C calls work I'm frankly shocked
> > that setting the locale in one thread affects the others.  Is this
> > just a bug on Linux, or is it a general problem on other operating
> > systems?
>
> Solaris' man page says...
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> NOTES
>      To change locale in a multithreaded application, setlocale()
>      should  be  called  prior to using any locale-sensitive rou-
>      tine.  Using setlocale() to query the current locale is safe
>      and can be used anywhere in a multithreaded application.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Note, that the effect is not just that the other thread might see
> a locale changed.  Pointers they got from localeconv or setlocale
> might turn invalid underneath them.  Or code they were running
> might be unmapped.  (After all, shared libraries uses as plugins
> are a common way of dealing with locales.)
>
> The unfortunate effect is that sscanf is not going to be useful
> for a library.  Unless you are willing to fork() but that comes
> with its own set of problems.

Well, fuck, so much for the CUPS 1.2 beta release today...

I'll make sure we reduce our use of setlocale() to query-only and
add all sorts of wrapper crap to "fix" things for non-POSIX locales
as needed.  One of the big new things for CUPS 1.2 is thread-safety,
so this is a show-stopper... :(

FWIW, I filed this issue as STR #1463, accessible at:

    http://www.cups.org/str.php?L1463

Please feel free to post suggestions, code, etc. that we can use.

--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com