Re: Thread-unsafe coding in ecpg

> So my conclusion is that this version of setlocale() has some
> thread-safety issues. I was all set to go file a bug report
> when I noticed this in the POSIX spec for setlocale:
>
> The setlocale() function need not be thread-safe.
>
> as well as this:
>
> The global locale established using setlocale() shall only be
> used
> in threads for which no current locale has been set using
> uselocale() or whose current locale has been set to the global
> locale using uselocale(LC_GLOBAL_LOCALE).

This one was new to me.

> IOW, not only is setlocale() not necessarily thread-safe itself,
> but using it to change locales in a multithread program is seriously
> unsafe because of concurrent effects on other threads.

Agreed.

> Therefore, it's plain crazy for ecpg to be calling setlocale() inside
> threaded code. It looks to me like what ecpg is doing is trying to
> defend
> itself against non-C LC_NUMERIC settings, which is laudable, but this
> implementation of that is totally unsafe.
>
> Don't know what's the best way out of this. The simplest thing would
> be to just remove that code and document that you'd better run ecpg
> in LC_NUMERIC locale, but it'd be nice if we could do better.

How about attached patch? According to my manpages it should only
affect the calling threat. I only tested it on my own system so far.
Could you please have a look and/or test on other systems?

Michael
--
Michael Meskes
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