Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 16:38:38 -0500 From: "Christian E. Hopps" <chopps@merit.edu> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> Cc: freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: namespace pollution (if_list) Message-ID: <20000328163838.C20019@merit.edu> In-Reply-To: <200003282102.QAA83159@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>; from wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu on Tue, Mar 28, 2000 at 04:02:09PM -0500 References: <20000328151907.K8280@merit.edu> <200003282031.PAA83082@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <20000328155244.A20019@merit.edu> <200003282102.QAA83159@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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On Tue, Mar 28, 2000 at 04:02:09PM -0500, Garrett Wollman wrote: > <<On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 15:52:44 -0500, "Christian E. Hopps" <chopps@merit.edu> said: > > > Is this the position of FreeBSD? > > No, this is my personal opinion. I didn't say anything about whether > or not it will be changed in FreeBSD -- I'll leave that up to whomever > made the original change. I'm simply pointing out that many headers > internal to the operating system have their own peculiar namespaces > and users should not expect to be able to use those namespaces with > impunity. Yes but thats what #ifdef _KERNEL is for. > To expound a bit further, and in a different direction: to the extent > any user program includes <net/if_var.h> at all, either the program is > broken, or the system is. There should not be any information in > <net/if_var.h> that user-mode programs have need to access. It will > make it more likely that your problem can be fixed if you tell us just > what data structures, precisely, your program is using from that > header. The point is well taken, nothing in if_var looks like a normal user program needs it. It would appear to be required by the IGMP SNMP MIB code which does some amount of poking around in kvm. To the system vs. program broken end I'm not sure which it is in this case becuase I'm not familiar with the SNMP code in question. It could be that technically the system is broken because its not exporting through a sane interface information which user programs may need. Chris. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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