tcl port and thread anabling

[Stephen Langer]

On Jan 11, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> If enabling threads in tcl will not cause any problems, then we should remove the variant, enable threads all the time, and revbump tcl and all ports that use it to force a rebuild.
> 
> But if there is still a valid reason why we'd sometimes want threads and sometimes not, then really we should have a tcl-threads subport within the tcl port, work should be done so that both tcl and tcl-threads can be installed simultaneously and not conflict with one another, and all ports that use tcl should decide whether they want threads support or not and depend on either tcl or tcl-threads.

The right thing to do is for all libraries to allow threads to be enabled or disabled at *run* time, not compile time.  The same thing goes for libraries using OpenMP.  Since OpenMP is incompatible with pthreads on some systems (including OS X), the decision to use pthreads or OpenMP should be made by the calling program.

I realize that this will be hard to do and it's completely unrealistic to expect it, but it would solve a lot of problems.

 -- Steve


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