Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 9 Mar 1998 08:24:15 -0500 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: Patch needed for mdutils |
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From: smurf@work.noris.de (Matthias Urlichs) Date: 7 Mar 1998 03:12:24 +0100
The correct thing to do is to NOT include linux/time.h in the first place.
Documentation should state (and probably does, in several places) that mixing glibc and kernel include files is not generally a good idea.
The problem is that there are certain system programs that need kernel constants. Sure, we could replicate the magic numbers and structures in our own user-level include files, but that introduces the possibilities that things will get out of sync, causing all sorts of problems.
So instead of using the standard glibc mantra of "mixing glibc and kernel include files is a bad idea, and programs who need to do this aren't our problem," let me suggest a better way (tm).
Let us fix the kernel header files with the appropriate #ifdef __KERNEL__ statements so it is safe to mix glibc and kernel include files. This means that kernel developers will have some work ahead of us. However, we also need to be compatible with libc5 header files, which *do* depend on certain defines which normally should be kernel-only. So, we will need the glibc folks to define some symbol (perhaps it exists already; I haven't done the research yet) which is always defined in glibc header files, whenever something fairly standard, like sys/types.h is included. This will allow us to appropriate conditionalize the kernel header files so that the header files are both compatible with libc5 header files, as well as glibc header files.
Does this sound reasonable?
- Ted
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