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Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 11:10:51 +1100
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199612310010.LAA14486@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: cvs-all@freefall.freebsd.org, CVS-committers@freefall.freebsd.org,
        cvs-sys@freefall.freebsd.org, peter@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject: Re: cvs commit:  src/sys/sys time.h
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>  Modified:    sys/sys   time.h
>  Log:
>  Add NetBSD/OpenBSD compatable timeradd()/timersub() user-space macros.
>  
>  These are deliberately not visible to the kernel since we have timevaladd()
>  and timevalsub() functions there.
>  
>  Obtained from: NetBSD/OpenBSD

Arrghh.  I've already explained at length why we don't need these.
NetBSD needs them for the kernel because they turned the functions into
macros.  This was probably a mistake because the functions are too large
to be macros on many machines; in any case, they are not in an inner
loop.  Making them visible outside the kernel is more obviously wrong.
It breaks any applications that have private versions of them with the
same name, and timevals are a stupid format to use outside the kernel.
The kernel uses them mainly because long longs and efficient floating
point operations weren't available 10 years ago.  Why add support for
a bad method 5-10 years after it became bad?

Bruce