Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__

Linus Torvalds
2004-11-30T16:57:02Z

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, David Woodhouse wrote:
>
> > Same thing here. The __KERNEL__ approach says "whatever you want, boss".
> > It doesn't get in the way. Maybe it doesn't actively _help_ you either,
> > but you never have to fight any structure it imposes on you.
>
> Having to think before adding something that's user visible is a
> _benefit_ not a disadvantage.

I've said this at least three times: if you can point to a _specific_
thing you want to move, go wild. I think the big waste in this discussion
has been that there have _not_ been specific suggestions, just total
sound-bites like "wouldn't it be great to move things to 'include/kapi'".

If you have a specific thing in mind, say instead something like

"Wouldn't it be great if we moved all the tty layer IOCTL numbers
into 'tty-ioctl-nr.h', and made the old header file just include
that header file, so that new libc users can get them from just
that header? And btw, here's the patch."

then I might listen. Notice how the only really constructive thing to come
out of this flame-fest has been a patch by Al that looked perfectly
reasonable, but that got totally drowned out by the arguing?

Note that even _if_ you have a specific thing in mind, I want to see that
somebody would say "yes, we'd use that organization". I would not be
surprised at all if glibc people said that they can't really use any
re-organization anyway, since they need to support old kernel setups too.

See? Changes that aren't specific enough, or don't actually help things is
what I'm against.

Linus