Re: [GSoC] Implementing libcap

[Esa-Matti Mourujärvi]

Hi,

> I see... So capget()/capset()/prctl() are the actual low-level functions
> provided by the kernel (through glibc); while libcap is a higher-level
> interface on top of them?

Yup, that sums it up nicely.

> Well, I actually meant adding this dummy header to the libcap package
> itself... But avoiding any modification to the actual libcap code.

Ok.

> Not really. We try to avoid adding random bits of foreign code to Hurd
> itself, to keep the copyright situation simple. This is about porting
> libcap though, not about additions to the actual Hurd code...

Ah, I see. Thank you for clearing that up.

> Oh... That might be a problem. This level of C understanding will
> probably be required to successfully complete this task...

Maybe we got to a wrong foot here. I will try to rephrase: I am familiar with
C's preprocessor conditional inclusions. What I was not familiar with is in
which cases do __CHECKER__ and __CHECK_ENDIAN__ get defined.

I did find about the above later on. __CHECKER__ is  defined when a
tool, Sparse, is used to find possible coding faults from Linux kernel. [1]
__CHECK_ENDIAN__ is used to mark the typedeffed types as restricted.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse

- Esa-Matti Mourujärvi / sukeri