Is it a good idea to put all of your includes in one header file?

Question

What is the best practice for C what you put into a C header file?

Is it useful to put all the includes used for a program across multiple source files in one header

Answer 1

I personally subscribe to a "put it where you use it" philosophy. It makes it much clearer which files use what, where dependencies are, etc.

Imagine you have a header MyHeader.h. If you make a change in it that requires changing code that relies on it, it's easy to find that dependent code if each file that uses it has a #include "MyHeader.h" - you can just do a global search for the include statement.

If on the other hand you only include MyHeader.h in some other header MyHugeHeader.h, and then include that in your files you can't do the same, since all that's in the files that use MyHeader.h is #include "MyHugeHeader.h", same as every other file.