On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 3:05 AM, Patrick Walton <pcwalton@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

Hi,

I noticed that libalpm isn't reentrant/thread-safe, even though it defines pmhandle_t to store all global information instead of using multiple global variables. This is unfortunate for my use case. I'm thinking about writing a cross-compiling makepkg-like utility, which would need to access two package handles simultaneously at once: that of the host and that of the target.

Is there a reason why libalpm isn't reentrant? And how frozen is the libalpm API supposed to be?

No reason - we haven't had a need for it as multithreading is largely useless when you're installing files to a filesystem. Feel free to send patches for this though. As with most open source, things will get implemented by those that care