Re: [gentoo-dev] Resolving HAL vs. pciutils/usbutils

[Doug Goldstein]

Daniel Drake wrote:
> Robin H. Johnson wrote:
>> Heya,
>>
>> So now this is not a flamewar.
>>
>> Jakub was originally going to complain at me for the upstream usbutils
>> adding support for gzipped usb.ids files, but a group of us (myself,
>> dsd, jakub, leio, steev) had a discussion about it, and came up with a
>> solution that both ends the breakage for direct users (HAL and others),
>> and provides forward momentum.
>>
>> So firstly, what's the real problem? The original complaint came up
>> because HAL expected the uncompressed file to exist as pci.ids, and
>> wasn't ready to look at pci.ids.gz. While this caused breakage, it was
>> only a warning sign that there was a deeper problem.
>
> I don't feel strongly enough to make an objection to your commit, but
> I think pciutils is doing the right thing, and despite me and Mike
> putting a hours into getting a decent HAL patch together the response
> I got was that as upstream they are simply "not interested" (no
> technical or logical objections provided), so I don't feel you should
> be putting workarounds in pciutils just to make HAL happy.
>
>
>
> Daniel
Daniel,

That's a LOAD of garbage and you know it. You're just straight away
making up stuff, essentially lying. You know damn well what the reasons
were since they were explained to you on numerous occasions.

When HAL evaluated the usage of  libpci the following issues were
identified:
 1) increased memory usage, to the point that HAL was not usable on the
OLPC project
 2) ABI breakage between patch revisions (i.e. x.y.z and x.y.z+1 were
not ABI compatible)
 3) no shared library
 4) the library calls exit() when it encounters an error in parsing it's
own pci.ids file which would kill the whole app using it.

There might have been more. I don't remember. Refer to ML discussions
and refer to IRC logs with me.

Now Mike (vapier) rectified #4 several pciutils releases ago by
providing a callback function that we could define which would override
the default exit() behavior. I still think it's sub-par to have an
utility library call exit() by default but whatever.

You were told by me and the HAL ML that once #2 and #3 are rectified and
if you could provide some basic memory usage information along with your
patch (i.e. show #1 isn't true anymore) that we would happily accept
your patch.

Now #2 and #3 are still not true in the latest release. There is no
guarantee by the pciutils maintainers that they will maintain ABI
compatibility while keeping the same .so version number. And there is
still no shared library built.

You addressed #1 on the mailing list with a simple statement, which I
will paraphrase. "It doesn't use more memory on my machine". To which
Danny K asked if you could provide some basic data behind that and you
never did.

As a result, 3 out of 4 concerns with your patch and pciutils were never
addressed and the issue was dropped on the HAL ML pending more feedback.
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