From: Ingo Schwarze Subject: Re: rpki-client: add error checks for pthread_* calls To: Theo Buehler Cc: David Gwynne , Job Snijders , tech@openbsd.org Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:28:31 +0200 Hello, Theo Buehler wrote on Tue, Jun 24, 2025 at 07:25:45AM +0200: > On Tue, Jun 24, 2025 at 03:22:21PM +1000, David Gwynne wrote: >> you should be doing this: >> >> int error; >> >> error = pthread_create(&writer, NULL, &parse_writer, &fd); >> if (error != 0) >> errc(1, error, "pthread_create"); > The reason for this is a cheat around a portability issue with errc(), > which isn't provided by glibc and musl. We should fix this in portable. > But automake is terribly annoying. I can absolutely sympathise with that. Gnulib is worse than automake is worse than autoconf, and when all three gang up on you, you are truly in hell. The degree of obfuscation they introduce into the build is extremely hard to manage and in practice prevents you from working on the *actual* tasks. In the example of textproc/groff, where the 1.23.0 release contains a massive number of regressions compared to the 1.22.4p4 we currently have in our tree, this has prevented me from updating groff for almost two years now in spite of several attempts. The gnulib-automake hell is so bad that it has repeatedly driven the whole effort over the edge of the cliff. I have now started setting up https://github.com/ischwarze/groff-port to keep track of all the patches, but that is still far from containing all the patches i have, and i'm still far from having all the patches needed for updating the port. However, the fact that autohell is indeed hell should not stand in the way of OpenBSD development. I have no problem with people using autotools *if* they like them. But if you don't like them (which is highly understandable), then don't let that impede OpenBSD development. Instead, simply throw autohell away if you don't enjoy the heat and smoke. Portable mandoc demonstrates how easy it is to simply write the configure script and the Makefile by hand and be done with it. That way, portability to modern operating systems is way better than with autotools, as the groff fiasco amply demonstrates. Do you really care that much about rpki-client running on 20th-century operating systems? FWIW, mandoc has supported even the following just fine without autotools: Sun OS 5.9, IBM AIX 7.1, IRIX Nekoware II, Minix 3. What more could you possibly want that might justify torturing yourself with autotools? Yours, Ingo