I was looking at using Thread::Status to work on some problems with one of my threaded applications, but it requires Thread::Signal, which currently only works on perls compiled with -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS.
Actually, the latest Thread::Signal does its own check to find out whether threads have pids or not and does not check Config.pm for -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS .
... I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0 with a custom compiled perl, where I removed that flag because it no longer is true.
You mean to say that ./configure didn't detect the -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS flag correctly? If that's the case, the simplest way to report this would be to use perlbug.
Two things: Can Thread::Status be made to work without Thread::Signal
If you can tell me a way to execute an arbitrary subroutine in a Perl thread, triggered by something outside of that thread, I'd be glad to adapt Thread::Signal to this. If it would have to be in C, that's probably ok as well. Being able to have a subroutine called at will is just _the_ capability you need. Otherwise you'd get into polling schemes such as using an alarm() with a very small value, which would interfere with any other alarms being set, etc. etc.
and would you know whom to contact about making perl properly detect the THREADS_HAVE_PIDS status?
Submit a bug report to p5p with perlbug (a script that comes with any Perl installation).
Almost all modern Linux distributions will have this problem, with the exception of Slackware (which will probably be there soon).
Unfortunately, not many people consider this a problem. I'm glad someone else finds this to be a problem as well.
Liz
