Re: /usr/include/linux and stuff

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> It's not glibc itself that does this AFAIK---when building glibc you
> use a symlink, at least that's the way it used to be---it's the package
> maintainer.  If your distro is Red Hat they're closely related,
> although the top glibc maintainer has made it plain that having his
> employer (Cygnus) merged with Red Hat did not fill him with joy.

The symlinks went because they were *truly* awful.

> As for "rank naughtiness", do you have an alternative suggestion that
> doesn't involve either (1) moving glibc into the kernel (in the sense
> of requiring a glibc rebuild with every kernel rebuild) or (2)
> undebuggable crashes due to glibc and /usr/src/linux/include/linux
> having different ideas about the way macros are expected to expand?
> <drepper [at] cygnus.com> wants to talk to _you_!

Kernel includes shouldn't be included in user-land compilation. Simple as
that?!

> glibc (any libc for that matter) will also make heavy use of kernel
> includes.  So it's quite possible that glibc, the running kernel, and
> the /usr/src/linux/include/linux tree have three different ideas about
> what's in the include files.  The kernel calls themselves are pretty
> robust, but a lot of those macros and typedefs are not, and glibc
> tends to use them in ways intended to hide changes in
> /usr/src/linux/include/linux.

Once glibc is compiled, the headers should match the library. It also
makes it a complete arse if you i) retarget compilers, ii) have multiple
glibc/libc, iii) have multiple kernel source trees. 

> If your program uses both glibc and direct calls to the kernel, you
> probably want to compile with the same set of headers as your glibc,
> and hope the kernel can take care of itself.

Erm, yuck? ;))) To be honest, it's about time the whole lot went into CVS
(kernel source tree, glibc, etc.) on the local machine, then all these
problems vanish...

Cheers,

Alex.


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