[pacman-dev] Non-reentrancy of libalpm, why?

[Patrick Walton]

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?

Thanks,
Patrick