Hi Pete,
Thank you for providing the libusbx side of the story. I know this
kind of email can be hard to write, and hard to respond to.
It sounds like working with the libusb maintainer was pretty frustrating
on both sides. I understand your need to fork, given the slow release
cycle of libusb. However, I'm going to avoid analyzing the community
issues you had in the past, and instead focus on the future of libusbx.
I have four community-related questions that I hope you can answer:
1. I'm glad to hear that libusbx has four maintainers. The more
eyes that are reviewing code and merging changes, the better the
code is, in my experience. Have you defined a process for adding or
removing libusbx maintainers in the future? It seems like you
really want to avoid a repeat of the issue you had with the libusb
maintainer not wanting to give up power.
My suggestion is that you allow nominations for maintainer addition
or removal from the community through the libusbx mailing list.
When someone seconds a nomination, everyone on the list should send
a private yay or nay vote to an unaffiliated third party, like Greg
KH. That third party should have the rights to add or revoke commit
access to the libusbx repository, so you can avoid the case where
the last-standing maintainer doesn't want to remove themselves. You
could probably just copy the Debian community voting model.
With a formal voting process in place, the community can have an
anonymous say in whether they want to add or remove a maintainer.
How does that sound?
2. Was there ever a libusbx announcement on the linux-usb kernel
mailing list? Have you asked LWN to run an article on the fork?
I can't recall ever seeing an announcement, although it may have
gotten lost in my inbox.
It's pretty important to rope in the USB kernel community for a new
userspace USB library. If you haven't sent an email detailing the
project's homepage, mailing list, and maintainers, I suggest you do
so. If you have, please accept my apologies for missing it.
3. How have Linux distros reacted to the libusbx fork? Are they
providing both packages and marking that one conflicts with the
other, or are they dropping libusb in favor of libusbx, or are they
sticking with libusb only? I see a note in the mailing list
archives that Debian straight switched to libusbx, but how are the
other Linux distros reacting?
I'm concerned that any work that's contributed to libusbx won't
actually be available for distro users. If the libusb release cycle
is as slow and problematic as you say it is, then any changes made
to libusb won't be available either for quite some time. This
leaves users needing to get releases from the git repo, which is
less than ideal.
4. (This is really just my opinion, feel free to ignore it.)
Would you consider a rename of the project? libusbx looks like a
misspelling of libusb to me, and since they are both sourceforge
projects, it's very easy to confuse or mistype the mailing list
address.
"libusb2.0"? "libusb-future"? "libusb-active"? "libusb-fork"?
"flibusb"? Actually, I kind of like "flib" usb. :)
> For what is worth, libusbx provides a publicly accessible roadmap [1]
> and, depending on our sorting out USB 3.0 BOS retrieval support (which
> could actually use a Linux contribution [2], and which is the result
> of yet another patch submitted to, but never acted on by libusb more
> than a year ago), we should be on track for the next release which is
> planned around the middle of the month.
Ok, great! I'll dig your mail on the USB 3.0 BOS descriptor out of the
archives and reply to it. BTW, would it make sense to share the BOS
parsing and printing code with lsusb? lsusb already has support for
getting, parsing, and printing both the SS endpoint companion and BOS
descriptors. Or are you going to be storing the descriptors in a
different format that would make it hard to share code with lsusb?
> [1] https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/libusbx/roadmap
> [2] https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=4FCCA5E3.8080101%40akeo.ie&forum_name=libusbx-devel
Sarah Sharp
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