Re: Flatten sysdeps/unix/bsd/bsd4.4 into sysdeps/unix/bsd

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

I think the evidence is now quite clear that this whole subject
needs to wait until after 2.16 at least.

Dropping sysdeps/unix/* from the Hurd sysdirs list does not seem
anywhere close to right.  (Despite the name, GNU is in fact mostly
just as much Unix as Linux is.)  Many of those files are used,
though syscalls.list is not.  Hurd does have ioctl (and a mostly
4.4-source-compatible set of ioctls usable for various things),
though its implementation is a novel automagic mapping of ioctl
encoding to Mach RPCs rather than passing the magic number to a
back-end "ioctl" call as monolithic kernels do.

"Cleaner" and "copies of ... installed headers" just do not belong
in the same sentence together.  A "solution" that involves copying
files so as to ensure that maintenance nightmare is frankly just
ridiculous on its face.

We already have multiple motivations to thoroughly revamp the
mechanism for sysdeps directory selection, as became clear with the
x32 cases.  I think it's quite clear that this is the direction we
need to go, not more contortions and uglification to work around the
difficult Implies nest we have to deal with today.  We don't know at
all yet exactly how it should be, but figuring that outis where the
energy should go.  It's not something to do lightly or quickly.

Until we've done that, leave sysdeps/unix/bsd/bsd4.4 alone.


Thanks,
Roland