Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__

Linus Torvalds
2004-12-01T00:48:33Z

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Even atomic.h. I could well imagine that somebody includes atomic.h just
> to get the thread-safe updates for some architectures. For example,
> asm-alpha/atomic.h does it right, and I would not be at all surprised if
> somebody had noticed.

In fact, this is not entirely theoretical. I know people _have_ noticed,
because I've gotten queries from some projects that wanted to copy the
definitions for their alpha port. I only got those queries because my name
is on the file, and those people wanted to actually copy them, not just
include the header file. I don't know _how_ many people decided to just
do the #include.

There are probably more people familiar with the kernel source tree than
with GLIB which is probably the preferred way to do those things these
days. And a few years ago that choice wasn't even there.

Linus