header file names risk collision with other headers

Tim Mooney — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:02:41 -0000

I'm experimenting with papi-1.0_beta on x86_64-sun-solaris2.10.

When you "make install", papi's install procedure
installs headers named (among some less-problematic names)

debug.h
http.h

These are installed into the top level of the include directory (${prefix}/include).

This strikes me as a very bad idea, because the header file names are very common (they could easily have the same name as other headers on the system).

I think it would be much safer if the headers were
instead either:

- named with papi in the name, i.e.

papi-debug.h
papi-http.h
papi-http-private.h
papi-ipp.h

etc.

- papi installed its headers into its own directory
under include, and any programs that want include
those headers should be modified to use

#include <papi/debug.h>

etc.

instead of just

#include <debug.h>

The second option (a ${prefix}/include/papi directory
with the headers going in there) is probably the better option, since that's what most other open source projects do these days.

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header file names risk collision with other headers