Re: [PATCH 8 of 20] ipath - sysfs support for core driver

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 09:09:37PM -0800, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 17:11 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> > These two files sure do show a lot of different stuff, all in a
> > predefined structure for a single file.  Please break them up into the
> > different individual files please.
> 
> The problem is that I want them to be presented together.  They look
> like a pile of different stuff, but they're actually Infiniband NodeInfo
> and PortInfo structures.  And yes, they are that ugly.

Then why not just have a bunch of different files for the different
things, and then a simple shell script to grab them all and put them
together however you want.

The main issue is that if you create a sysfs file like this, and then in
3 months realize that you need to change one of those characters to
be something else, you are in big trouble...

> These files fall into the same categories as the atomic_counters and
> atomic_snapshots files you raised objections to earlier; it actually
> makes sense to look at them as a whole, not their constituent parts.

Sure, lots of different files can be combined by a script into a whole.

> In the earlier round of review, people suggested that I use netlink for
> stuff like this, but I quickly decided I'd rather gnaw my leg off than
> use the netlink API.

Just because you don't want to use it doesn't mean it isn't the proper
tool...

thanks,

greg k-h