demise of linuxthreads

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

As was foretold, I have removed the linuxthreads code from the libc trunk.
The core maintainers of the GNU C library will no longer be supporting it
for 2.4 and later releases.  The 2.3 series of releases remains as it has been.

LinuxThreads has never been an official part of the GNU C Library.  Its
maintenance has always been a volunteer effort done for the benefit of
users of systems with Linux kernels.  It's manifest truth that LinuxThreads
has served the users well over the years, but its day is over.  The Linux
2.6 kernels and the NPTL implementation that works with them are now pretty
mature, and in many regards work much better than LinuxThreads does today
or ever has.  We who have done that maintenance now feel the users are best
served by moving on and not spending more time on LinuxThreads.

As I said, those of us maintaining the 2.3 stable release series will
continue to maintain the 2.3 linuxthreads code to the extent we have been
doing.  The newer linuxthreads code, that was in the trunk through today,
is now in the ports repository.  As of today, it still builds and works
fine.  That condition won't last.  If people are interested in continuing
to maintain linuxthreads to make it possible to do trunk builds using it as
before, they're welcome to do so in the ports repository (someone able
would have to step forward to referee the changes).  It will be easy enough
to do that in the short term; it may well get harder and approach
infeasibility as time goes on and development progresses on the trunk
without regard for limitations linuxthreads imposes.  Don't expect any
sympathy about that from us core maintainers (we just won't buy the idea
that you really need linuxthreads compatibility after all this time, except
for old binaries that you can use with 2.3 instead).  As of now, I
personally have no plans to work on it and don't know of any other
interested volunteers.  I don't think there is any reason to consider this
any loss.  LinuxThreads is really, truly, deservedly obsolete now.

On behalf of the developers of the GNU C library, the GNU Project, and
users everywhere, I would like to thank Xavier Leroy, and everyone who has
worked on LinuxThreads over the years, for their contribution to the
community.  It took us a very long time to get the new implementation to
where it is, and LinuxThreads held the fort for years while we got it done.


Thanks,
Roland