Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261626AbUK2Eg4 (ORCPT ); Sun, 28 Nov 2004 23:36:56 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261627AbUK2Eg4 (ORCPT ); Sun, 28 Nov 2004 23:36:56 -0500 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:4554 "EHLO www.linux.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261626AbUK2Egy (ORCPT ); Sun, 28 Nov 2004 23:36:54 -0500 Message-ID: <41AAA746.5000003@pobox.com> Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 23:36:22 -0500 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds CC: Paul Mackerras , Greg KH , David Woodhouse , Matthew Wilcox , David Howells , hch@infradead.org, aoliva@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, libc-hacker@sources.redhat.com, Mariusz Mazur , Arjan van de Ven Subject: Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__ References: <19865.1101395592@redhat.com> <20041125165433.GA2849@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> <1101406661.8191.9390.camel@hades.cambridge.redhat.com> <20041127032403.GB10536@kroah.com> <16810.24893.747522.656073@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1806 Lines: 40 Linus Torvalds wrote: > In short: having the kernel use the same names as user space is ACTIVELY > BAD, exactly because those names have standards-defined visibility, which > means that the kernel _cannot_ use them in all places anyway. So don't > even _try_. > > On the bigger question of what to do with kernel headers in general, let's > just make one thing clear: the kernel headers are for the kernel, and big > and painful re-organizations that don't help _existing_ user space are not > going to happen. > > In particular, any re-organization that breaks _existing_ uses is totally > pointless. If you break existing uses, you might as well _not_ re- > organize, since if you consider kernel headers to be purely kernel- > internal (like they should be, but hey, reality trumps any wishes we might > have), then the current organization is perfectly fine. I don't think any drastic reorganization is even necessary. Mariusz Mazur updates http://ep09.pld-linux.org/~mmazur/linux-libc-headers/ for each 2.6.x kernel release. linux-libc-headers are the kernel headers, with all the kernel-specific stuff stripped out. i.e. userland ABI only. Not sure how many distros have started picking that up yet... I think Arjan said Fedora Core had, or would. If people want to go beyond that, IMHO it would be simple and easy to start putting new kernel headers in include/kernel (or somesuch). That way there are no massive reorganizations; kernel-specific stuff gets slowly migrated to a kernel-specific area. Jeff - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/