libusbx is dead, long live libusbx!

[Pete Batard]

On 2012.03.23 04:04, Michael Plante wrote:
> Did you not see Xiaofan's thread in libusb-devel on Wednesday?
>
> http://marc.info/?l=libusb-devel&m=133230593401933&w=3
>
> Many Linux distros are using that tag.

Yes, but for a branch that we do not want to officially carry in 
libusbx, because the tag is not against mainline.

Or are you implying that we should officialize the wip-hotplug, testing 
and all the libusb-mplante, libubs-stuge in libusbx, because they exist 
in libusb?

As far as I am concerned, we are forking from master, so anything that 
isn't currently in master is libusb's realm, not ours. Else, we are only 
going to confuse users: libusbx has nothing to do with libusb's 
1.0.9-rc3, and it doesn't look like people will have trouble accessing 
1.0.9-rc3 off libusb.org if they need to. Why should we have to 
duplicate something that is likely to confuse users. Better make it very 
explicit that 1.0.9-rc3 did not originate from libusbx.

1.0.9-rc3 is for libusb. We are not libusb.

> It doesn't matter if libusbx uses it or not.

No, but it is confusing, because we may get asked about something that 
has nothing to do with our project, since we decided to use mainline as 
the base from our fork. And regardless of whether we have the tag or 
not, triage will still work (see below).

> It is considered a semi-formal release by many, even though Peter
> didn't want it to be.

And that will not change whether we carry it in libusbx or not.
I really fail to understand, considering that up until now there was no 
such thing as a libusbx 1.0.9-rc3 tag, and that what we do with regards 
to keeping or removing the tag will not have any impact on libusb's 
1.0.9-rc3, why you deem it so important to keep a duplicate that carries 
no weight.

I wouldn't mind hearing anybody else's opinion on that, but it sounds 
very logical to me that, since 1.0.9-rc3 is not something that exists in 
libusb's mainline, and that said we only wanted to concern ourselves 
with is libusb's mainline as our starting point, we should carry non 
mainline tags. What we are doing in libusbx doesn't mean the tag will 
cease to exist in libusb.

> I think we should acknowledge it exists,

We do. It exists in libusb. If you are interested in libusb's release 
candidates, then please head to libusb.org. If you are interested in 
libusbx's release candidates, then please head to libusbx.org. Those are 
separate projects, that, up until the fork (but then only with regards 
to mainline) use a different set of tagging.

Or let's say I was to tag the latest commit in libusbx's mainline as 
1.0.9-rc1, and we get some distros using that one. Are you going to ask 
Peter to carry such a tag in libusb's mainline repo, because then libusb 
may get questions about libusbx-1.0.9rc1?
If not, then why should the opposite be true?

> If we plan to completely replace libusb, we
> will get bug reports against it

Well, there are 2 aspects here: someone comes with a bug that cannot be 
reproduced in libusbx's mainline (or with libusbx's 1.0.9 release) in 
which case we aren't going to support them, because it's a libusb issue 
=> pure 1.0.9-rc3 bugs will be directed to libusb, and someone who comes 
with a bug that can be reproduced with either libusbx's mainline or 
latest release, in which case it doesn't matter whether 1.0.9-rc3 was 
used in first instance.

Triage does makes the need to carry 1.0.9-rc3 in our tree unnecessary, 
as it really doesn't matter whether we have a tag or not to check bug 
reports.

Regards,

/Pete

PS: please subscribe to and copy libusbx-devel at lists.sourceforge.net, as 
we will switch over to this list sometime in the future (but probably 
not anytime soon)