On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 6:04 PM, Hanno Böck <hanno@g.o> wrote:
> I got this bug and as I don't know if this is correct what the user says (no
> idea about smp), I'm posting this here for comments:
>
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224729

Looks like there are 3 possible uses of the threads/smp USE flags:

1) Add support for a threading API in a library/language (for example
in dev-lisp/sbcl)

2) Add support for threading in an application (www-servers/apache, for exmple)

3) Add support for a multi-processor machine -- this is different from
(2) in that the application doesn't really gain anything if this is
used on a uni-processor machine (sys-cluster/charm seems to fall in
this category)

I guess it would be consistent to use "threads" for (1) and (2), and
"smp" for (3).

Now, as for Gimp, grokking through the sources shows that "--with-mp"
basically lets some processing stuff run in separate threads. This is
clearly only useful on SMT/CMP/SMP machines, so I think USE=smp is
fine.

The user's complaint could be valid, though. Perhaps "smp" should be a
global USE flag.

Cheers,
-- 
Arun Raghavan
(http://nemesis.accosted.net)
v2sw5Chw4+5ln4pr6$OFck2ma4+9u8w3+1!m?l7+9GSCKi056
e6+9i4b8/9HTAen4+5g4/8APa2Xs8r1/2p5-8 hackerkey.com
--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list