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

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Sun, 2017-04-09 at 10:17:41 +0200, Philipp Kern wrote:
> 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.

Upstream development for sysfsutils is still going, they have f.ex.
merged all patches Debian was carrying, plus several cleanup patch
series I've sent, and have done new upstream releases. As the current
maintainer in Debian I do not consider it obsolete, and would
encourage anyone to use it, in preference of having to manually parse
stuff from /sys.

> > 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.

Indeed.

So from my side, if you'd like to switch to something else, for
whatever reason, that's fine, but if you'd rather keep using libsysfs,
then that should also be fine.

Thanks,
Guillem