Re: PATCH: Readline on MinGW

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 17:17:35 -0400
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> Cc: bug-readline@gnu.org, gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com
> 
> > why did they use "Otherwise"?  To me, this says that `raise' is not
> > always the equivalent of `kill''.
> 
> Because in an environment which supports multiple threads, it behaves
> as pthread_kill (pthread_self(), sig) as described above.

I'm sorry for misinterpreting the text.  But I think the bottom line
still holds: `raise' and `kill' are subtly different in some
situations.

> > In any case, it is traditional on Posix platforms to use `kill', not
> > `raise'.  I think the latter was introduced by ANSI/ISO C; if Readline
> > does not mandate an ISO C compiler like GDB does, it would make more
> > sense to use `raise' only if `kill' is unavailable.
> 
> This isn't right.  POSIX mandates the existence of raise; ANSI/ISO C
> does not specify anything having to do with signals.

This is a misunderstanding: I didn't mean to say that Posix doesn't
include `raise'.  I wanted to say that `kill' existed on Unix
platforms long before the introduction of `raise' by ANSI C.

> Anyway, I've got no problem with using autoconf for this

Neither have I.

> but I can't think of any case where it would make a difference.

In a multithreaded application?  Or on an old platform that doesn't
have `raise'?