[U-Boot] [PATCH] flash.h: pull in common.h for types

Scott Wood
2009-11-17T21:10:48Z

Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Mike Frysinger,
>
> In message <200911161703.46965.vapier@gentoo.org> you wrote:
>>> Why would that be needed? Which problem are you trying to solve?
>> like the subject very briefly says, 'for types'. if your source code includes
>> flash.h before anything else, it'll fail to compile as flash.h uses types not
>> declared implicitly by the compiler.
>
> I'm not sure if this is needed or even wanted.
>
> We don't attempt to make all header files self-sufficient, or do we?
> Does Linux do this?
>
> When looking at man pages for system calls and library funtions it
> seems this is not the case; also, I can find wise people argumenting
> against self-sufficient headers (and others argumenting in their
> favour).
>
>
> My question: is there a definitive position somewhere (for example
> for the Linux kernel; I'm sure we don't have one for U-Boot [yet]),
> whether system headers should be self-sufficient?

I'd say they should be self-sufficient, in that the inclusion of the
header itself should not fail if I haven't included some arbitrary other
header. I don't see what the argument would be for not doing this.

I don't know whether Linux has a specific policy on this, but I haven't
noticed many problems in this regard, and when I did find one in the
kernel a few years back I didn't get any argument when I submitted a
patch to fix it.

Which man pages are you looking at?

-Scott