[ltp] RE: Generic battery interface

Brown, Len linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:05:35 -0400


>On 7/28/06, Brown, Len <len.brown@intel.com> wrote:
>> I'm not religious about /dev vs. /sys.

Tho I'm starting to feel like I've touched off some religion in
others:-)

>I would greatly prefer a sysfs interface.

Understood.

>Having a clean, textual sysfs API that's easily accessed from shell
>has been extremely conductive for the development of the tp_smapi
>driver -- users can easily test and script the driver without extra
>programming and userspace components. Since tp_smapi is (AFAIK) the
>most feature-rich battery driver we now have, this is some to
>consider.

> clean

well, one man's "clean" is another man's "dirty", I guess this is
subjective.

> textual

good for shell scripts, not clear it is better for C programs
that have to open a bunch of files by name.

> sysfs was great for develping tp_smapi

Wonderful, but isn't the key here how simple it is for HAL
or X to understand and use the kernel API rather than the
developers of the kernel driver that implements the API?

If X were a shell script, I'd say a file per value would
clearly be the way to go, but it isn't.

-Len