Description of problem:

Fedora's build of libmysqlclient hides the THR_KEY_mysys extern variable. This variable contains the thread-specific storage key used by MySQL. ODB (ORM for C++) uses this key to work around issues in automatic MySQL thread initialization/termination (more details below). As a result, ODB fails to compile with Fedora's version of the MySQL client library while working fine with all other distributions (Debian/Ubuntu, SUSELinux) as well as with the MySQL project-provided builds of the library.   

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

MySQL 5.5

How reproducible:

Always.

Steps to Reproduce:

Try to link the following test program:

#include <pthread.h>
extern pthread_key_t THR_KEY_mysys;
int main () {return pthread_getspecific (THR_KEY_mysys) != 0;}

gcc test.c -lmysqlclient_r


Actual results:

/tmp/ccc4WJxN.o: In function `main':
test.c:(.text+0x6): undefined reference to `THR_KEY_mysys'


Expected results:

No errrors.


Additional info:

I realize that this hiding of undocumented symbols is intentional. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to implement automatic thread initialization/termination (mysql_thread_init()/mysql_thread_end() calls for each thread) without access to this key. Here is a more detailed description of what we are doing here:

MySQL requires that each thread that uses the MySQL API first call mysql_thread_init() and at the end call mysql_thread_end(). If the thread fails to call mysql_thread_end(), then MySQL will block the main thread at program termination and wait for this threads to call mysql_thread_end(). If that doesn't happen, then it prints an error message to STDERR. Not a very user-friendly behavior. 

In ODB we are using pthread thread-specific storage to implement automatic handling of this initialization/termination. The idea is basically to call mysql_thread_init() before the first call to the MySQL API and then use the TLS destructor to make sure mysql_thread_end() will get called before the thread exits. This "almost" works without THR_KEY_mysys. The "almost" part comes from this behavior of the Linux pthread implementation (this could also be standard-mandated, I am not sure). When a thread exist the TLS machinery goes over all the TLS slots and calls destructors for those that specified one. Apparently, for those that didn't specify the destructor, it sets the value to zero. So what happens in the case of MySQL is that pthread might set the MySQL TLS slot value to 0 before calling the ODB slot destructor. When ODB destructor calls mysql_thread_end(), MySQL examines its slot value, sees that it is 0,
and ignores the call, assuming this thread has already been terminated or was never initialized.

The only way that we could think of how to resolve this is to cache the MySQL's slot value and then restore it just before calling mysql_thread_end(). And for that we need access to THR_KEY_mysys.

I see that you already export some undocumented/internal functions that are used
by other software (e.g., PHP). I realize this is not ideal, but would it be possible to add THR_KEY_mysys (defined in mysys/my_thr_init.c) to this list?