Extensionless headers

[Phil Edwards <pedwards at disaster dot jaj dot com>]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 09:56:45PM +0000, Nathan Myers wrote:
> The committee's political hackery certainly didn't touch on why they are
> needed.  (Anyway the discussion at the time assumed that the actual
> filenames would continue to be extended; the canonical comment was
> that "they are header names, not files; it's the implementation's job
> to provide a set of declarations when it sees include <foo>, and it's
> none of our business how".)

Here's a simple proposal to make everyone happy:

1)  Leave the standard headers where they are (in std not bits), and rename
    them in place from foo to std_foo.h.  Essentially moving std_foo.h
    from bits to std, just spread out over a couple of days.

2)  Change include/Makefile.am to that when the staging headers are created,
    they are done with standard names:

       include/foo  ->  ...../include/std/std_foo.h

    Thus, when they are installed, they are also installed with their
    standard names.


Alternatively, we could skip step (2), install the headers as std_foo.h so
that users looking in installed headers will have their file managers and
editors and all those things just work.  Then we teach cpplib to do the
foo->std_foo.h translation for that set of headers.


G'night,
Phil

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