Doug Goldstein wrote:
When HAL evaluated the usage of libpci the following issues were
identified:
1) increased memory usage, to the point that HAL was not usable on the
OLPC project
I was only ever aware of concerns that memory usage might be high, but
wasn't aware it caused specific problems.
I went through the first 3 pages of google results for
"pciutils inurl:hal site:lists.freedesktop.org"
"libpci inurl:hal site:lists.freedesktop.org"
and didn't see anything. Maybe it was discussed elsewhere.
Anyway, if this did happen once, it doesn't seem to happen any more, see
below.
2) ABI breakage between patch revisions (i.e. x.y.z and x.y.z+1 were
not ABI compatible)
This doesn't matter when you statically link against the library, as
long as the API doesn't change. The API that is used in Mike's patch
does not seem to have changed for a long time. (Nevertheless, see my
notes under the following item -- this will be solved when the next one
is solved.)
3) no shared library
This is a fair point, but I thought it was never raised as an objection,
I didn't think it was actually a blocker for acceptance. Especially
given that parts of HAL already statically link against libpci.
I just looked over the threads again and I now see this:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-June/008836.html
I apologise, I must have missed that before.
OK, so having a dynamic libpci is an outstanding requirement for the
patch. I will follow up with pciutils upstream about the current state
of that.
4) the library calls exit() when it encounters an error in parsing it's
own pci.ids file which would kill the whole app using it.
There might have been more. I don't remember. Refer to ML discussions
and refer to IRC logs with me.
I looked over them, I don't see any others.
Now Mike (vapier) rectified #4 several pciutils releases ago by
providing a callback function that we could define which would override
the default exit() behavior. I still think it's sub-par to have an
utility library call exit() by default but whatever.
Yeah.
You were told by me and the HAL ML that once #2 and #3 are rectified and
if you could provide some basic memory usage information along with your
patch (i.e. show #1 isn't true anymore) that we would happily accept
your patch.
You addressed #1 on the mailing list with a simple statement, which I
will paraphrase. "It doesn't use more memory on my machine". To which
Danny K asked if you could provide some basic data behind that and you
never did.
I did:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-June/008852.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-June/008861.html
Anyway, apologies for the oversight on the shared library thing -- it
appears it wasn't total silent rejection after all. I'll let you know
where that leads.
Thanks,
Daniel
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