use of pthreads-win32 in gnulib?

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Hi,

The GNU gnulib project [1][2] provides a portability library for porting
programs written against the POSIX API to all kinds of platforms. One of
these platforms is mingw (native Win32 API).

All reasonable porting targets nowadays implement the POSIX threads API,
except for mingw. (The others that don't are Solaris 2.4 and BeOS. But these
are not reasonable porting targets any more.) Therefore your library would
nicely fit into gnulib.

What gnulib provides so far, relating to multithreading, is only a portable
layer for handling locks (mutexes) and TLS. But generally it's preferrable
to use the POSIX API rather than some other API; this is another reason
why your library is interesting for gnulib.

How well tested is pthreads-win32? Is there a list of packages that uses it?

Can it be built on mingw with pretty clean, standard Makefile infrastructure?
Does building with "gcc -Wall" produce only a small amount of warnings?

If gnulib started to "virtually" include your library (i.e. make it available
in source code when a gnulib user requests the gnulib module 'pthreads'),
would that be OK with you?

Regards,
                     Bruno


[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/
[2] http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnulib