Re: [PATCH] Add attribute container to the generic device model

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 11:06:10PM -0600, James Bottomley wrote:
> Attribute containers allows a single device to belong to an arbitrary
> number of classes, each with an arbitrary number of attributes.

But classes could always have an arbitrary number of attributes, right?

> This will be used as the basis for a generic transport class, but I did
> it like this in case anyone found the abstraction useful.

Hm, I like the idea, but we already allow devices belonging to arbitrary
number of classes (through class_device) today.  What makes this
different?

And how does this change, if at all, sysfs representations of devices
that use this?

Some minor comments about the code:

> +EXPORT_SYMBOL(attribute_container_classdev_to_container);

Can these all be EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL?  It's your choice, as you wrote the
code, but we're trying to keep the driver model stuff all GPL explicit,
as there's no way someone can say it's a "derived work" from long ago
that's using these new functions.

> +/**
> + * attribute_container_add_device - see if any container is interested in dev
> + *
> + * @dev: device to add attributes to
> + * @fn:	 function to trigger addition of class device.
> + *
> + * If no fn is provided, the code will simply register the class
> + * device via class_device_add.

You mean the class_device of the "container", right?

The code looks sane, if not a bit confusing as there's no user of it :)

thanks,

greg k-h