Re: [PATCH] vlan: set sysfs device_type to 'vlan'

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 1:36 AM, David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Doug Goldstein <redacted>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:53:57 -0500

quoted

Sets the sysfs device_type to 'vlan' for udev. This makes it easier for
applications that query network information via udev to identify vlans
instead of using strrchr().

Signed-off-by: Doug Goldstein <redacted>

You're extremely misguided.  This change, in fact, makes it ten times
harder for such applications to query such devices.

Because now the application has to decide whether it wants to support
EVERY EXISTING SYSTEM OUT THERE or not.  Hundreds of millions of Linux
systems do not provide this attribute.

Applications have to handle the case of not having the 'vlan' device
type available attribute essentially forever.

So providing it in new kernels provides zero value whatsoever.

I'm not applying this patch, sorry.

Dave,

As others on this thread have discussed there are other merits to the
patch as well. Yes you are correct that netlink is the preferred
method to gather information about network devices but the point was
really to make the sysfs layout more correct a matter of completeness.
As Ben Greear pointed out this would allow shell scripts and other
scripting languages to better detect vlans. Kay pointed out that this
would allow better uevent filters in the future as well. So there are
some merits to this patch. If you'd prefer I can resubmit with a
better commit message entailing the reasons behind it.

Thanks.
-- 
Doug Goldstein