[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Removing non-pthreads support

[Alexander Strange]

On Apr 19, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Howard Chu wrote:

> M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
>> FFmpeg currently supports four different threading libraries:
>> pthreads, beos, win32, and OS/2.  I suspect most people already use
>> pthreads, and all the relevant operating systems seem to have a
>> pthreads implementation, even OS/2.  I'm not sure about old BeOS, but
>> I doubt anyone is still using that, much less with threads.
>> 
>> To ease the maintenance burden, I suggest we drop support for all but
>> pthreads in FFmpeg.  If there is a compelling reason for keeping any
>> of the others, please speak up now.
>> 
> Just out of curiosity, what pthreads implementation on Windows are you referring to?

This one:
http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/

Unfortunately the last release isn't perfect - if you use it as a static library you have to call some init code yourself.
pthread.c obviously doesn't do that since that's not required by pthreads, but some distributions patched it.

Ramiro's Windows builds now use a patch against the library itself (autostatic) which gets rid of that, but I don't know if it's been applied upstream.
I hope it has since the idea of needing a local patch for this is gross and prevents switching to some other library.