*BSD News Article 12257


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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!olivea!sgigate!sgi!igor!jbass
From: jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: 386BSD vs BSDI
Message-ID: <1993Mar3.214122.20180@igor.tamri.com>
Date: 3 Mar 93 21:41:22 GMT
References: <1n0mgmINNjat@ftp.UU.NET> <1993Mar3.120727.11788@igor.tamri.com> <C3BsBv.2xHu@austin.ibm.com>
Organization: DMS Design
Lines: 22

In article <C3BsBv.2xHu@austin.ibm.com> guyd@austin.ibm.com (Guy Dawson) writes:
[ list deleted ]
>
>If they are defined that I would argue that they are published since
>the purpose of the header files in /usr/include and /usr/include/sys etc
>is to publish APIs etc.

.... some people would like to think so, but I disagree ... many vendors
ended up with the following text in their header files (from SGI):

/*      Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T */
/*        All Rights Reserved   */

/*      THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T     */
/*      The copyright notice above does not evidence any        */
/*      actual or intended publication of such source code.     */

in addition many of the fields and defines in the header files are
strictly FYI since C lacks better data hiding abilities .... their
mere existance in a header file does not include them in the API.

John