Re: [linux-usb-devel] [PATCH 6/9] isdn4linux: Siemens Gigaset drivers - procfs interface

[Karsten Keil <kkeil@suse.de>]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 12:36:32PM +0100, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
> Greg KH wrote:
> > Are there existing userspace tools that rely on proc files for isdn
> > control?  If not, please do not add new proc files, these should be in
> > sysfs instead.
> 
> Thanks for your comment. We'll move everything to sysfs. Most of it is
> done already, but there is a problematic case I'd like your advice on:
> the "info" and "hwinfo" entries, which emit several lines of status
> and statistics information.
> 

To solve this in sysfs, you could create a group (subdir) and there
use a entry with a value for every status item.
Same for statistics info.
See /sys/class/net/<netdevice>/statistics/ as example. 

> According to Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt:
> "Mixing types, expressing multiple lines of data, and doing fancy
> formatting of data is heavily frowned upon. Doing these things may get
> you publically humiliated and your code rewritten without notice."
> We certainly don't want to risk that. :-)
> 
> We have tentatively created an entry in /proc/tty/driver/ as proposed
> in LDD3 chapter 18, section "proc and sysfs Handling of TTY Devices"
> as a replacement. But that has the drawback of giving us only a
> single file per driver as opposed to one or two files per device.
> So the driver has to enumerate the devices and concatenate their data,
> which appears cumbersome, even though normal users will probably
> never connect more than one of these devices.
> 
> Is there a better alternative?

See above, I would drop procfs completly.

-- 
Karsten Keil
SuSE Labs
ISDN development