Subject: Re: Kernel header changes break glibc build

From: Thomas Graf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 15:23:27 +0100

* David Woodhouse <[email-masked]> 2006-12-06 14:07
> On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 14:59 +0100, Thomas Graf wrote:
> > Are you suggesting that the kernel has to keep macros around which
> > are of no use to the kernel itself just because glibc uses them?
> 
> No, although in fact that _is_ the only reason we use these horrid __uXX
> types rather than proper C datatypes, isn't it?

Alright, so we agree that there must be a possibility of getting rid of
deprecated crap which leads to interface abusage.

Fixing things is as simple as #ifndef IFA_MAX respectively IFLA_RTA in
some compat header.

> I'm suggesting that if you want to change things around as you did, you
> should make sure the users of those headers adapt to cope. You did fix
> the in-kernel users; you neglected to fix glibc -- and as far as I can
> tell you didn't even bother to _warn_ glibc folks.

I didn't warn them because I didn't know better. I was under the
impression that glibc still maintains their own set of headers
and will fix this automatically when they look at the diff. That's
what I do for my userspace applications that use kernel headers.

Ideally install_headers would do the trick but it often fails f.e.
when some application which uses bsd features thus including net/if.h
also wants to use new linux features and includes linux/if.h which
then conflicts.