LinuxThreads future

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat dot com>]

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Now that NPTL has proven to be portable and working on all kinds of
platforms we'll soon start moving it over to glibc.

This of course opens the question what happens to LinuxThreads.  The
answer is: it's immediately frozen.  No modifications which change the
interface will ever be added.  No new interfaces will ever be added.
This is important to allow recognizing binaries which use NPTL-only
features to be recognized at startup time via symbol versioning.
LinuxThread's libpthread.so will have GLIBC_2.3.2 as the last symbol.

All bugs in the current code are declared features.  People have been
living with them for years now, so it is nothing existential.  I
personally won't spend any time on LinuxThreads anymore.  We are not
going to deliberately break LT compatibility and using the add-on in
glibc will be possible until glibc 2.4 comes out (whenever this will
happen).  There will be no support whatsoever for LinuxThreads once this
happened.

Of course people are free to pick up the LinuxThread sources and do
whatever they want with it (according to the license).  The only request
is that no version name ever used is GLIBC_x.y.z etc.

- -- 
- --------------.                        ,-.            444 Castro Street
Ulrich Drepper \    ,-----------------'   \ Mountain View, CA 94041 USA
Red Hat         `--' drepper at redhat.com `---------------------------
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