Re: Is there a header conflict?

At 1:53 PM -0700 4/22/03, Terry Lambert wrote:
>Riccardo Torrini wrote:
>  > Anyway, from time to time, I remove /usr/include and do a make
>  > includes but what happens if I forgot to make "order" ?  Same
>  > problem with old libraries (my system comes from February 20
>  > 1999, always upgraded). How can I safetly remove unused stuff?
>
>People complain about this all the time.
>
>Then someone volunteers to automate it.
>
>     [...etc...]
>
>Then nothing changes, because everyone who could make the change
>is pissed off at everyone who could ask to have their commit bit
>taken away if they make the change, and so they all sit around...

While this is a topic that keeps coming up, and keeps going
round-and-round whenever it does come up, the main problem is
that it's not as easy to come up with a "good for everyone"
solution as it first seems to be.  The 'pissed off' part comes
because plenty of people come up with ideas which would work
perfectly fine for them, but which would not work well for
"all" freebsd users.

After the last go-round, I spent some time working on it.  I did
clean installs of releases 4.3 through 4.7, and 5.0.  I then
compared what ends up on the disk for each of those installs,
and got a list of files which should disappear for each release.
Looking over those lists, I realized that (a) the list was a lot
bigger than I had expected, (b) the files are all over the place
(not just /usr/include and /usr/lib), and (c) the list of files
will depend on a variety of things that the admin might have
selected at install time, or while installing ports.

At about that point I had to shuffle several machines around,
including the machine I use for these development projects on,
so that project is sidelined.  Basically what I did was prove
to myself that it was tougher to do this right than I initially
expected.

None of this probably means much, except to say that I did do
more than the usual "just yell at everyone else about it" step.
I also do hope to resurrect what I was working on after I get
some of my other side-projects out of the way.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu