Re: Thread-, Signal- and Cancellation-safety documentation

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

On 03/26/2013 07:43 AM, Rich Felker wrote:
> > As a result, many functions were marked as unsafe, with âglocaleâ as the
> > reason.  More recently, talking to Carlos about the consequences of this
> > and debating how best to approach the need for some functions to be
> > MT-Safe in spite of setlocale, we decided to document setlocale itself
> > as unsafe, so that calling it after starting threads was documented as
> > problematic.  Then, we could document the fast-path functions as MT-Safe
> > even though they don't bother with locking.
>
> Per POSIX, setlocale is thread-safe.

But is this really meaningful because of the way it changes global 
state?  For example, setlocale followed by strcoll is still not 
thread-safe in the sense that the strcoll call is guaranteed to use the 
requested locale.

--
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team