On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 06:26:00AM +1100, Bojan Smojver wrote: >... > When I said "legal", I meant that in the technical sense. Along the > lines of "if I rely on what's below CORE_PRIVATE, am I setting myself up > for a disaster when those things change without notice?" > > Basically, are functions and other bits available under CORE_PRIVATE a > fair game for module developers or are they in publicly available > headers by some historical accident? Are they "standard" part of the > API, but as you said for "the ones that know what they're doing" (which > would then exclude me :-)?
They are not part of the public API. They are very subject to removal, change, or other bastardization at a whim. A number of modules within the httpd distribution erroneously set that #define and then use stuff. But we can always fix those things if we make changes to the "hidden" APIs. I can think of at least two points in the past where some of us have said, "this is crap! we should move all this gunk to a private header!" Great idea, but nobody has been peeved enough to do it. So yah: you run a risk of you use them. If you *do* need something hidden by CORE_PRIVATE, then bring it up along with a rationale for why that thing should be made public. That's your best solution. Cheers, -g -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
