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hier(7): drop list of /usr/include subdirectories
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Authored by mhorne on May 8 2023, 2:35 PM.
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Details

Summary

It is nice to have, however, the location of this information means that
it will naturally be missed by developers adding or removing directories
to the layout, so it trends out-of-date.

The target audience for hier(7) is users and administrators. It is not
expected to be a place that programmers should go to learn about the
purposes of the different C headers provided by FreeBSD.

Program authors needing FreeBSD-specific interfaces or libraries
(#include <sys/queue.h>, for instance) will either be following a more
detailed man page, or consulting the header contents directly. Folks
targeting standardized headers (#include <sys/time.h>) will not need
hier(7) to tell them where those headers are under /usr/include.

In other words, this is more detail than necessary for this document.
I'd go as far as to say that many of the existing entries in this list
do little more than parrot the name of the directory.

With all this in mind, let's drop the maintenance burden.

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mhorne requested review of this revision.May 8 2023, 2:35 PM

Some of these might be useful... but I'm inclined to agree here.. while the sys/time.h example could be nit picked, the same isn't true for ppbus and the like...

This revision is now accepted and ready to land.May 8 2023, 2:45 PM

The only thing I think we might want to consider is a further comment after "standard C include files" that gives some pointer to where more information could be found.

Maybe refer to https://bugs.freebsd.org/261349 when committing. Thanks.

I intend to!

The only thing I think we might want to consider is a further comment after "standard C include files" that gives some pointer to where more information could be found.

I like it, but I am not sure what to point to. The names of the ISO C and/or POSIX standards? We have c(7) which contains a bit of information in this regard, but not a list of standard include files.