Re: GIO will link with -pthread soon

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 23:10 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote:

> The easiest fix here is to link libgio with -pthread.  We discussed this
> at the GTK meeting yesterday and decided to do this unless anyone on the
> list has a compelling reason not to.

Its certainly an easy fix. However, it will inflict e.g. threadsafe
malloc and all the other libc functions on all single-threaded Gtk+ apps
which is not a small cost (although the Gtk+/glib locking will not be
enabled unless you call g_thread_init()). 

If there are no other solutions this is of course what we have to do. I
won't cry too much, as threads are much more important and performant
these days on linux than they used to be (there used to be a low, hard
limit at the number of processes in the system linking to libpthreads
even!). However, if there is *any* other solution that would be
prefered.

One issue with this change is that it sort of breaks the whole reason
for having libgthread in a separate library. Maybe we can link libgio to
libgthread instead? It won't make it disappear, but it will at least
make the thread lib status standardized across platforms.