Octave's m4/acx_pthread.m4 & OSX

[Jarno Rajahalme]

Octave maintainers,

Now that the gnulib dirfd issue is solved, the m4/acx_pthread.m4 istributed with Octave represents the only issue preventing compilation of the development branch without local changes to the octave files.

I don't know what is the policy regarding the m4 file modifications, but when compiling with GCC 4.5 in OSX (10.6), the following change is needed in acx_pthread.m4:

*** m4/acx_pthread.m4~ Fri Sep  3 17:47:09 2010

--- m4/acx_pthread.m4 Fri Sep  3 20:19:45 2010

***************

*** 149,154 ****

--- 149,158 ----

  

          acx_pthread_flags="-pthreads pthread -mt -pthread $acx_pthread_flags"

          ;;

+  

+  *-darwin*)

+  acx_pthread_flags="-pthread"

+  ;;

  esac

  

  if test x"$acx_pthread_ok" = xno; then

Without this change the _REENTRANT preprocessor symbol does not get defined, and consequently some of the math functions (e.g. lgamma_r in /usr/include/architecture/i386/math.h) are dropped out, which makes Octave compile fail.

Other parts of the same file already contain some darwin dependencies.

Ben Abbott wrote earlier:

"The change to acx_pthread.m4 is from Thomas Triechl and resolves the _REENTRANT error on MacOS X."

Is it possible to get this change into the octave distribution of acx_pthread.m4, so that this bug would not reappear with every new version of Octave?

With regards,

  Jarno Rajahalme