Hi all, My employer, Novell, has organized a "hack week". This is one week where every employee is free to hack on whatever he/she wants [1]. Unsurprisingly I decided I would spend that time on libsensors. I posted the idea here: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/ideas/generic-sensors-library I already made preliminary cleanups yesterday and this morning. Tomorrow, serious things will begin. I thought I'd mention my plans here, so that people get a chance to object before I commit my changes. First of all, I want to remove all chip-specific code from both libsensors and sensors. I think we all agree that it will ultimately go away, and removing it from the way right now will make it easier to focus on the new interface we want to expose. This will break sensord (and all 3rd party libsensors users), but I don't really care. sensord is not built by default, and we can fix it later. 3rd party apps will need to be fixed later too. Secondly, the sensors command-line interface. I would like to get rid of -u (Treat chips as unknown ones) and -g (Use generic printing routine for all chips), because they will be the default (and only way) with the new libsensors interface. I am also thinking of getting rid of -U (Do not show unknown chips), because with the hwmon class, such chips can't be reached to start with. However this raises the question of which kernel versions we want the new libsensors (and the lm-sensors package in general) to support. I don't think we want to support anything before 2.6.5 because the sysfs interface changed too much before this version, and i2c had some problems too (e.g. i2c-dev numbers not in sync with i2c-adapter numbers.) But if we only support hwmon class access, this means we only support kernels 2.6.14 and later. This is perfectly fine with me, but I'm curious if others will object. Then I'll be inspecting the libsensors interface as it is now. This is the single most important thing to look at in order to be able to release a new libsensors quickly. The rest can be improved later, but the interface will be pretty much carved in stone for the next 8 years (assuming the new library lasts as long as the previous one did, and I hope so) once we release the first public version. Everyone, please realize that the new interface will not be compatible with the old one, and the new libsensors will get a new .so number. This means that this is the perfect time to make all the cleanups and changes we can't do in a stable library. It's basically now or never. In parallel, I want to write a perl script to convert libsensors configuration files from the old symbol names to the new ones. And move the i2c tools to a separate package, as mentioned yesterday. [1] http://idea.opensuse.org/content/hackweek -- Jean Delvare
