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On Nov 30, 2004, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote: > On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> On Nov 30, 2004, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote: >> > If you want to use a legal analogy, the ABI is not a contract, it's a >> > public _license_. >> I didn't mean to use a legal analogy. I meant contract in the >> software engineering sense. Sorry if that wasn't clear. > Then your definition of a "contract" is flawed or your world-view has > nothing to do with reality. It's not my definition, it's a definition used in software engineering. Sure, if you ask a legal mind, you'll get a different answer. If you ask a bridge player, you'll get yet another definition. That's why we have jargons in which common-use words have their meanings narrowed to the specifics of certain fields. And that's why it's so hard for specialists in different fields to talk to each other at times when there's disagreement about the precise meaning of certain words. > An ABI is not a contract. Not a legal contract, for sure. An ABI is a definition of an interface, including operations with pre- and post-conditions, data structures with their invariants, constants, file formats, etc. Most of that is covered by the software engineering term `contract'. Sure enough, the headers we're talking about describe only a very small portion on that; pretty much only data structures and constants. It certainly doesn't *specify* the entire ABI, it only highlights portions of it. Anyhow, all of this is beyond the point. I see you've decreed that people can introduce `user' directories in the kernel now. Would you please reconsider and choose a dir name that would enable the same ABI headers to be used by kernel and userland, without adding a directory to /usr/include that has no indication that it comes from the kernel? Thanks, -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
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