Hi list, A colleague and I have noticed that the Perl easyblock forces inclusion of the “-Dusethreads” compiler directive. This has caused us some difficulty in which a package requiring threads, forks and MPI dies a gruesome death to do with pthreads. An experimental build of Perl without “-Dusethreads” doesn’t exhibit the same problem. We’re therefore looking at ways of using Easybuild to build a non-threaded Perl, and can think of two options: removing “-Dusethreads” as a default configuration option and allowing maintainers of easyconfig to add it in within configopts, or adding an extra option with a corresponding new if condition in the easyblock itself.
I would prefer the first option. Use of interpreter-based threads in Perl is noted to be discouraged (http://perldoc.perl.org/threads.html), and the former option will be easier for writers of new easyconfigs to implement insofar as they won’t have to consult a strange custom option. However, removing “-Dusethreads” as the default would affect backwards compatibility, so I was interested in getting feedback before I commit to one option or the other. Any thoughts or opinions on the subject? Thanks, Ben
