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Bug#856060: Please don't use obsolete libsysfs-dev any more



Hi Michael,

On 02/24/2017 11:05 PM, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Some years ago libsysfs (source package: sysfsutils) was written as an
> abstraction layer for accessing /sys/. However, this turned out to be
> a historical error and evolutionary dead end: It does not actually
> abstract anything (it's just as specific to the Linux kernel and a
> particular version thereof as /sys itself), and just adds unnecessary
> complexity, RAM overhead, and bugs. Thus its development has ceased
> years ago, in favor of programs just using /sys as it is.
> 
> In fact, most applications probably don't want to access /sys at all,
> but use libudev [1] or gudev [2] instead. These provide a better API
> for device enumeration, properties, and callbacks for hardware
> changes.

I can see how we ended up here, but it still does abstract something
away: access to sysfs, avoiding bugs in accessing it from C in the process.

Both this and s390-netdevice use libsysfs to iterate over devices on
a specified bus, extracting and writing some attributes (stuff like
"online" (r/w), "devtype" (r/o), "cutype" (r/o), setting the ccwgroup,
layer2 and portno settings on Ethernet adapters). Is that something
libudev would be suitable for? If so, it'd need to grow a udeb.

Interestingly enough glib does have a udeb. Would that mean that gudev
could be a potential option? Would that just require a udeb for udev and
one for gudev (which has 40k on my system)? That might be more pleasant
to work with.

> This package is one of the few which still use the old libsysfs. Can
> you please check with upstream to prepare a migration away from
> libsysfs to using plain /sys or libudev? I hope that we can drop the
> old libsysfs entirely for wheezy.

Unfortunately for this and s390-netdevice there's no upstream to work with.

> Thank you for considering!
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/libudev/

This link is broken.

> [2] http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/gudev/

And so is this one.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

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