On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 02:18:36PM +0200, Karel Zak wrote: > On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 02:20:46PM +0100, Daniel Drake wrote: > > evstate is a small utility that queries evdev state of a specific > > key, switch, button, LED or sound event. This is useful in programs > > such as powerd (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Powerd) which need to query > > things like the state of the laptop lid switch from shell code. > > > > Our earlier non-upstream approach to this was to add sysfs nodes that > > would indicate button state, but Dmitry Torokhov is against seeing those > > in the upstream kernel as it is duplicating info from the input layer: > > Sounds too crazy... > > The duplication is normal (see for example block devices). There is > many places where we have the same information accessible by ioctl() > as well as by sysfs. Sometimes it makes sense to provide alternative way of accessing data; however block devices do not export every block as a binary sysfs attribute, do they? Same goes for input. > > The sysfs is usually the preferred way, because it does not require root > permissions to read the attributes and you can use standard file/text > utils rather than any specialized ioctl wrappers. Yep, that'd be great. "Look, ma, I can see what root is typing..." > > > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.platform.x86.devel/1089 > > Wow, so you have already implemented a patch that exports the state > in *human readable format* by sysfs. This patch was NACKed. Yes, on the ground that it is not a good idea to sprinkle driver-specific sysfs attributes all over the place when there is already a generic way of accessing this data. > > Now it's expected that everyone in userspace will use ioctl() (with > root permissions?) Yep, see above. > and translate any crazy bit array to something > human readable. Right? Really? Right. Really. Now I'd say that this utility probably better fit into linuxconsole project with the rest of input-related utilities... Thanks. -- Dmitry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
