Re: [dmidecode] Why not libifing dmidecode ?

[Jean Delvare]

Salut Erwan,

On Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:50:13 +0200, Erwan Velu wrote:
> My name is Erwan Velu and I've been packaging dmidecode for linux 
> distributions (Mandriva/mageia) but also part of the syslinux project.
> 
> I'm the author of a tool HDT (hardware detection tool) that aims at 
> detecting the hardware configuration at the bootloader time.
> 
> It starts to become quite popular, used by many distro but also by 
> hardware manufacturer, computers recycling associations, ...
> 
> Of course, DMI informations are very useful as it features so many 
> items. When I started working on my project, I did a simple integration 
> of dmidecode in it.
> 
> To be honest, dmidecode is mostly designed for printing things out 
> directly to stdout. I'd love having a libdmi that allow detecting some 
> stuff, feed a data structure than I'm able to print when necessary.
> 
> The other point, is that would help doing updates as you're pretty close 
> to the available items in the most recent specs.
> 
> I'm pretty sure this changes could be very useful for other projects too.
> 
> Would you like working together on such libification work ?

This has been proposed many times, and every time I suggest that anyone
in need of library-based DMI data access should simply use libsmbios
which offers exactly this:
  http://linux.dell.com/libsmbios/download/libsmbios/

If there any problem with this approach?

-- 
Jean Delvare