I really hate the patch. I think it's fundamentally flawed. I hate scripts
that test for things that are readable, and encourage people to then write
crap instead.
The thing is, the headers_check stuff is just wrong if it causes these
things, and I'd rather just turn it off.
If those
#ifdef CONFIG_XYZ
things result in problems, then we should just make the rule be that we
turn that kind of string into
#if 0
automatically when exporting the kernel headers. IOW, just about
_anything_ that headers_check complains about automatically is something
that should just be _fixed_ automatically at header install time rather
than make the code harder to read.
So I think it makes our headers worse. Code like
> +#ifdef __KERNEL__
> +# ifdef CONFIG_X86_BSWAP
> +# define __X86_BSWAP
> +# endif /* CONFIG_X86_BSWAP */
> +#endif /* __KERNEL__ */
just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense _inside_ the kernel, and it
doesn't make sense _outside_ it either.
As far as I can tell, the header install script could literally just do
something like run 'sed' over the headers as it installs them, and do
something like
sed 's/\<CONFIG_[A-Z0-9_]*\>/__kernel_only__/g'
which I realize is not really the complete/correct solution (ie you could
write a nicer thing that does a better job), but my point here is that
rather than have scripts that _whine_ about these kinds of trivial things
and cause people to write less readable header files, we should just make
sure that if we can recognize them so easily, we can just fix them
instead.
End result: headers that don't suck.
If the damn headers-check isn't working for people, then let's turn the
thing off, not make our code look worse.
There are parts of the patches that look fine, like moving __KERNEL__
checks around a bit, and changing <asm/types.h> to <linux/types.h> which
looks correct _both_ in a kernel and in a user context, but I dislike the
stupid parts.
Linus
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