Re: compiling development sources

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 02/10/2010 01:38 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

I don't know how many of these actually need to be included in .h
files.  For example, should a .h file include everything necessary for
it to be included and work in a .cc file, or should we expect that a
user of a .h file will have to include other headers first so that it
will work? 

I think that common practice is to only include "local" things in
a .h file, and to assume that C or C++ stuff that is in their standard .h
files gets included by referencing the standard headers.  Generally, it
is not a good idea to define objects which are defined in C or C++
headers.  Best to treat any problems that this causes as, at best,
special cases.  But, I also know that getting this to work and be
portable is not easy.  Also, there have been cases of multiple defines of
objects within the standard /include files, so what you get depends on the
order of your includes.  I think that this (at least in Linux distributions) has
been cleaned up, but I would not bet on it.

Michael