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SubjectRe: OFFTOPIC: e2fsprogs and +2Gb partitions
   Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 16:55:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>

I think that kernel header files should be used for building the
kernel. Nothing else.

I for the most part agree. However the issue I brought up still
stands for a soluation, as does another issue:

1) The latency from adding a new (for example) flag bit to
a structure and when user programs can actually get at it.

2) The "just 'cp' it" argument is slightly parsimonious to me,
if we could just 'cp' it, we wouldn't have kernel header
file issues with glibc, changes do need to be made to make
them "libc friendly" or whatnot, and here is where errors
can be introduced

But I'm not so concerned about #2, I'm concerned about #1. Especially
in places where the additional flags are needed for certain parts of
core functionality in userspace. A good example of this case would be
a package such as gated, which might test for presence of certain
RTCF_* flags to determine which features it can enabled during a
kernel build. How do I propagate new RTCF_* flags into userspace in a
short period of time?

What about when new SCSI cdrom or IDE or (add your favorite driver
here) ioctls are added... I could go on and on...

It used to be possible with kernel headers, but as many have pointed
out kernel headers used by userspace have a lot of other problems.

So all I ask is a proposal to solve this problem within the context of
the way we want things to work now. I think Matti pointed out some
important issues which need to be addresses as well, wrt. inet6
support on glibc-2.0.x systems running 2.1.x kernels

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com

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