Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 30 Nov 2004 14:51:20 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__ |
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On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, David Woodhouse wrote: > > That depends on your definition of 'break'. It should prevent abuse.
Not really.
It should prevent _future_ abuse.
The notion of "preventing existing xxx" is insane. You can't "prevent" something that already happened unless you've come up with some new interesting theory of causality.
> To pick a specific example, since you like them: where userland programs > are including atomic.h, and hence writing programs which don't compile > on some architectures, and which compile on others but silently give > non-atomic results, it's perfectly acceptable and indeed advisable to > prevent compilation across the board. > > Some people might call that breakage; I don't.
I do. The thing is, the people who _notice_ the breakage are often the people who don't know what the hell to do about it.
The way to prevent _future_ abuse is by adding something like
#ifndef __KERNEL__ #warning "This really doesn't work" #endif
which does that, and has the advantage of not breaking anything at all.
In other words: if you want to move things around just to break things, THEN THAT IS INCREDIBLY STUPID. We don't do things to screw our users over.
Feel free to send a patch.
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