Re: 2.6.18 Headers - Long

From: David Woodhouse
Date: Sat Jul 15 2006 - 17:46:08 EST


On Sat, 2006-07-15 at 17:09 -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> David Woodhouse writes:
> > Kernel headers are _not_ a library of random crap for userspace to
> > use.

> Don't blame app developers if they go for what is good.
> To stop them, provide the goodness in a sane way.
> (alternately, make the Linux code suck ass more than POSIX)

Kernel headers are _not_ a library of random crap for userspace to use.

There is no justification for asm/atomic.h being installed
in /usr/include. Especially since, as Arjan points out, it doesn't
actually provide atomic operations in many cases anyway.

However, the kernel is released under a licence which allows you to
re-use code from it if you really want. If you want to provide a
'libkernelstuff', the GPL permits you to do that. The kernel's ABI
headers (and lkml) are not the appropriate place for such a project
though. If you want to do that, take it where the C++ and microkernel
people go.

Btw, your mail client omitted the References: and In-Reply-To: headers
which RFC2822 says it SHOULD have included. On a list with as much
traffic as linux-kernel, that's _very_ suboptimal, because you've
detached your message from the thread to which you replied. Please try
to fix or work around that.

--
dwmw2

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