Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Jan-2011, CdeMills wrote:

| Another problem, which is surfacing from times to times: liboctave is not
| thread safe. In short, it contains either static/persistent/global
| variables, either it returns buffer to statically allocated data. I had a
| very quick look at liboctave, searched for 'static' keyword, and found two
| files, tempname.c and tempnam.c, whose copyright is
| /* Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
| This file is part of the GNU C Library.
| 
| This is to say that, since 14 years (I looked into the revision control), 
| those sources are disconnect from gnu libc. Shouldn't we set, as new metric:
| 1) identify and remove those leftovers

I think that's what we have been doing with gnulib for about a year now.

The two files that you mention are surrounded by

  #ifdef HAVE_TEMPNAM
  ...
  #endif

so their contents won't actually be used if the tempnam function is
available, which it would be on systems with glibc.

For this specific case, maybe the gnulib tempname module could be used
to replace these two files.  Would you like to look into that?

| 2) identify static/persistent/global variables, and mark them for
| modifications ?

Sure, that would be great.  If you would like to work on this, then I
think the best thing is to take on one thing at a time and
incrementally improve things.p

jwe