Re: Recent changes to sysctl.h breaks glibc

[Sam Ravnborg]

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 02:06:18PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 02:56:25PM +0200, Martin Schlemmer wrote:
> > Point is just that people like you keep on bitching about not
> > using sanitized kernel headers, but do nothing about it, or
> > until today have said nothing about 'sanitized headers'.
> 
> Why don't you just get the glibc-kernheaders package from rawhide
> (or the equivalent from your prefered distribution) and stop
> complaining? 

Since this is brought up againg.

Today we have:
include/asm-<arch>
include/linux
include/<subsystem>

Within include/linux grep told me that "#ifdef __KERNEL__" was present
in 219 places. So a lot of header files are kept in a shape that allows
them to be included from user-land.

I see two possible solutions here:
1) Automate the process of creating sanitized user-land headers.
- It should be a trivial task to do - but will require some effort
  to be done right. Does any tool exist to do it today?
  Automation allows glibc to user kernel headers for a recent
  kernel without looking up a distribution specific set of header
  files somewhere.
  
  Dave M brougt up one issue the other day, when he added a new define
  to a header file. No need to wait for a distribution to pick up.

2) Create a user level hirachy under include/ [obviously 2.7 material]

include/linux/user
include/<subsystem>/user
include/asm-<arch>/user

In reality we will see a lot of files in include/linux that looks like:

sched.h:
part 1 - all relevant includes:
	#include <linux/.....>
	...
part 2 - user level interface
	#include <linux/user/sched.h>

part 3 - kernel specific definitions.
	extern rwlock_t tasklist_lock;
	extern spinlock_t mmlist_lock;

I am well aware that by default glibc shall NOT use kernel headers.
But IMHO it is too difficult to upgrate to a new version of the kernel
headers.

Care to explain what is wrong with the above approaches - I may have
missed something obvious.

	Sam