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

[Dave Yeo]

On 04/20/10 03:43 am, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> Dave Yeo<daveryeo at telus.net>  writes:
>
>> On 04/19/10 02:16 pm, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
[...]
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> Make test succeeds on OS/2 with pthreads enabled whereas os2threads
>> are currently broken.
>
> Then I suppose nobody will miss it if we remove it.

I think it should be totally rewritten. In the absence of a volunteer to 
rewrite it (I'll ask around), it should probably be removed in a week or so.

>
>> The pthread library is incomplete though most things linked against
>> them do work.  http://web.os2power.com/yuri/PthreadTls
>
> As long as it has everything FFmpeg needs to run, that's good enough
> for us.
>

The other problem is that the file my_os2thread.c is copyright (C) 2000 
MySQL AB under the GPL v2+. It would be nice to get it relicenced as 
LGPL or better. I'll research this as parts are also copyrighted by 
MySQL under the LGPL.
For now I think it would be fine for the pthread library to only be 
available with --enable-gpl as the main uses for FFmpeg under OS/2 are 
GPL, eg MPlayer. If someone really wants a threaded LGPL version of 
FFmpeg they could always write one.
This also raises the question of how the Win32 version of Pthreads is 
licenced, our source comments are all Win32 specific.
Dave