Plans for I2C Tools 4

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Problem

There is a major issue with I²C Tools 3, which has been present since the beginning, even when the code was still part of lm-sensors, and which I want to solve now. This problem is i2c-dev.h.

There have always been two flavors of file i2c-dev.h. One comes from the kernel and contains a description of the /dev/i2c-* kernel interface, as kernel header files are supposed to do. The other comes from the i2c-tools package, and contains not only the description of the /dev/i2c-* kernel interface but also definitions copied from <linux/i2c.h> as well as inline functions duplicating the i2c_smbus_* functions from the kernel to make the same functionality available to user-space applications. This was an afternoon hack but nobody ever bothered cleaning it up so it's still there more than ten years later.

There are many problems with the current situation:

• Having two public header files with the same name is confusing. Application developers as well as distribution packagers don't know which file they should use. They can't package both.
• One has to keep all files in sync continuously. Thankfully they don't change much, but when they do, it's easy to overlook the change and forget to propagate it.
• The inline i2c_smbus_* functions are actually too large to be inline functions, and recent versions of gcc will complain loudly about that.

Proposed Solution

I propose to solve this problem in four steps.

Step 1: Cleaning up i2c-dev.h

We need to get rid of the i2c-dev.h file in i2c-tools, and before we can do that, this copy should be aligned with the one in the kernel. This means that anything extra must be moved somewhere else. Then all applications must be adjusted to include the right header files. Later, we can just remove the i2c-dev.h file from i2c-tools and use the kernel version of the file instead.

Status: Committed (1/3, 2/3, 3/3)

Step 2: Creating a library for i2c_smbus_* functions

All the i2c_smbus_* inline functions should be moved to a proper shared library.

Status: Committed (1/2, 2/2)

Step 3: Extending the library

More functions may be added to the library, for example the ones currently in tools/i2cbusses.c.

Status: Code moved from tools/i2cbusses.c to lib/busses.c, functions renamed to meet a reasonable naming convention. Needs self-review.

Step 4: Documentation

Document the library API.

Status: Committed (1/1)

Note: This will need revisiting once step 3 above has happened, in order to document the functions which have been moved to the library.