device filtering support

[Michael Plante]

Pete Batard wrote:
>> My preferred idea was pretty much to go with creating a thread on init,
>> but you guys still didn't seem to see it as acceptable

Who is "you guys"?  I thought I said from the beginning that I thought that
was a reasonable compromise.


Pete Batard wrote:
>> On 2012.02.05 02:02, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
>> > I agree with you that Pete' cure is worse than the disease. But if we
go
>> > with the approach Travis is using in libusb-win32 and libusbK, app2
will
>> > not disturb app1 at all.
>>
>> But it's even worse! You've broken libusb, and users can no longer rely
>> on expecting the same features across platforms. And suddenly, your
>> _generic_ library becomes both lot less generic.

We've lost the context here.  Please elaborate.  Doing *what* has broken
libusb?  It sounds like you're describing an effect, no topology, as the
breakage, but you haven't described the cause very clearly.  Or maybe I
missed it in the flood of earlier emails.  I do remember something related
to filtering, but does that have anything whatsoever to do with process vs
thread?  If not, what does that have to do with the text you quoted and
replied to from Xiaofan?


Pete Batard wrote:
>> If 2 libusb apps are expected to be able to use the same
>> DLL from system32,

Faulty premise.  I never assumed that.  In fact I assumed the opposite.
Ignoring the rest.


Pete Batard wrote:
>> Michael wrote:
>> >> They may even come to RELY on certain bugs to
>> >> continue to exist.
>>
>> Really? Are we becoming Microsoft there? ;)


Not us, but our developer-users may behave that way.  The fact is that the
moment we impose this approach, we have to support every possible type of
developer-user out there, including Microsoft-like developer-users (just to
quote you, not that it matters what it means -- every means every) and
developer-users that may go out of business and/or stop updating their
software.

This is in contrast to the fallback mechanisms we had before with static
linking, where one program could use a very old version and one program
could use the latest and greatest, both at the same time.  I remain
unconvinced that a public API can support both for all time.  There will
eventually be breakage, even if it doesn't happen until 2.0 or 3.0.  And,
for this approach, breakage is never acceptable, even across major versions.

Regards,
Michael