| 1 |
Heya, |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
So now this is not a flamewar. |
| 4 |
|
| 5 |
Jakub was originally going to complain at me for the upstream usbutils |
| 6 |
adding support for gzipped usb.ids files, but a group of us (myself, |
| 7 |
dsd, jakub, leio, steev) had a discussion about it, and came up with a |
| 8 |
solution that both ends the breakage for direct users (HAL and others), |
| 9 |
and provides forward momentum. |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
So firstly, what's the real problem? The original complaint came up |
| 12 |
because HAL expected the uncompressed file to exist as pci.ids, and |
| 13 |
wasn't ready to look at pci.ids.gz. While this caused breakage, it was |
| 14 |
only a warning sign that there was a deeper problem. |
| 15 |
|
| 16 |
libpci exists so that every application that wants to read the pci.ids |
| 17 |
file does not need to know the format, and so that the pciutils |
| 18 |
maintainers can change the file format (paired with changing their |
| 19 |
parsing code), without causing breakage for any other packages. |
| 20 |
|
| 21 |
HAL is not the only user of pci.ids/usb.ids: |
| 22 |
http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%22pci.ids%22 |
| 23 |
http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%22usb.ids%22 |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
Here's DSD's original thread on the HAL lists: |
| 26 |
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-June/008834.html |
| 27 |
And he also noted this, but I don't have a link for it. |
| 28 |
<dsd_> upstream PCI are going to change the format too, they gave |
| 29 |
like a years notice |
| 30 |
Also: |
| 31 |
<robbat2> dsd_, thanks. so really, once the libpci is installed as |
| 32 |
a shared lib, there's no reason that HAL shouldn't use it? |
| 33 |
<dsd_> robbat2: indeed - and nobody actually raised that as an |
| 34 |
objection, parts of hal already statically link against |
| 35 |
libpci... |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
So at the moment, HAL needs the changes, but the patches have been |
| 38 |
blocked because pciutils needs move to a shared library and not cause |
| 39 |
ABI breakages instead of the present static-lib-only situation. |
| 40 |
|
| 41 |
usbutils is in very similar (but not quite identical) position, they |
| 42 |
have not yet introduced any library, but will be doing so, to enable |
| 43 |
similar format changes. |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
The solution that the group of us agreed on, was the following: |
| 46 |
For USE=zlib, pciutils and usbutils should use the .gz version, |
| 47 |
but ALSO maintain the uncompressed version until all applications |
| 48 |
have migrated to using the libraries to handle the pci.ids. |
| 49 |
|
| 50 |
This uses the upstream-preferred formats for download, and stores |
| 51 |
suitably so that both {pci,usb}utils work, and HAL works as well |
| 52 |
(without the note about installing pciutils with USE=-zlib). The only |
| 53 |
download until this transition is finished is using an extra 180Kb on |
| 54 |
disk for the compressed versions (120Kb for the pci.id.gz and 60Kb for |
| 55 |
usb.ids.gz). |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
Attached is my patch that has pci.ids stored in both styles (also cleans |
| 58 |
up old .gz files if compression is not being used). I've got it ready to |
| 59 |
commit to the tree with pciutils-2.2.8, and similarly for usb.ids |
| 60 |
(pending an ongoing discussion with upstream usbutils about their |
| 61 |
server-side usb.ids). |
| 62 |
|
| 63 |
If there is no major dissent when I get up tomorrow, I'll commit this, |
| 64 |
as the end to the breakage. |
| 65 |
|
| 66 |
-- |
| 67 |
Robin Hugh Johnson |
| 68 |
Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy |
| 69 |
E-Mail : robbat2@g.o |
| 70 |
GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85 |
Archives