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Re: Consensus: Tuning runtime behaviour with environment variables.


- User changeable environment variables that impact library runtime
   behaviour is dangerous.

   * Could you specifically point out what you find dangerous?
     I see no more danger than we already face when adding a new
     API or reviewing code changes. How is this different
     than all of the other work we do?

Reading env variables may reduce multi thread safety level. I know
Siddhesh's patch doesn't have such issue. But I hope every developer
pay attention threading. i.e. In almost case, reading env var is not
generically safe after entering main(). As we already got reported,
at least, OpenOffice.org uses both setenv() and multi-threading. Even
though it is not unspecified from the standard POV, it's real.


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