Hi Daniel,
It's a cultural issue.
A long time, there were technical reasons to put all the exported symbols
in a small number of "ksyms" and "netsyms" files. These reasons were
grounded in the limitations of the a.out object format.
Starting about 2.1.1 if I recall correctly, the kernel is compiled with
ELF tools rather than a.out tools. But there is still a lot of "ksyms.c"
style code out there. More than that, the meme of "make a foo_syms.c file
to export all the foo related symbols" is still in people's heads. The
new meme of "each file exports the symbols it needs to export" is spreading,
but hasn't quite killed the old meme yet.
Linus has deprecated the "foo_syms.c" approach and that will help resolve
these problems in favor of the "export from netfilter, not notsyms"
approach.
To put it another way: it takes a long time between the time that some
coding technique becomes obsolete, and the time that all vestiges of it
disappear from the kernel corpus.
Michael Elizabeth Chastain
<mailto:mec@shout.net>
"love without fear"
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