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Date:   Sun, 20 Feb 2022 14:50:17 +0100
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Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] iio: core: provide a default value `label` property
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To:     Jonathan Cameron <jic23@kernel.org>,
        Nandor Han <nandor.han@vaisala.com>
Cc:     linux-iio@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
References: <20220216135604.3435769-1-nandor.han@vaisala.com>
 <20220220131809.1bc184e0@jic23-huawei>
From:   Lars-Peter Clausen <lars@metafoo.de>
In-Reply-To: <20220220131809.1bc184e0@jic23-huawei>
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On 2/20/22 14:18, Jonathan Cameron wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 15:56:04 +0200
> Nandor Han <nandor.han@vaisala.com> wrote:
>
>> The label property is used to correctly identify the same IIO device
>> over reboots. The implementation requires that a value will be provided
>> through device-tree. This sometime could requires many changes to
>> device-trees when multiple devices want to use the label property.
>> In order to prevent this, we could use the device-tree node
>> name as default value. The device-tree node name is unique and
>> also reflects the device which makes it a good choice as default value.
>> This change is backward compatible since doesn't affect the users that
>> do configure a label using the device-tree or the ones that are not
>> using the labels at all.
>>
>> Use the device-tree node name as a default value for `label` property,
>> in case there isn't one configured through device-tree.
> Interesting idea.  However a few concerns come to mind.
> 1) If we start having a default for this, then it will get used as ABI
>     and if a label is applied later to the DT then we will end up breaking
>     userspace scripts.
> 2) If we do this it should be firmware agnostics (we need to fix
>     the existing code to be such as well).
> 3) Is the node name always unique (think multiple accelerometers on
>     different i2c masters)?
> 3) I'm fairly sure this information is readily available anyway.
>     either via the of_node link for the iio\:deviceX
>     So why not have your usespace use that instead of label?
>     I'm not a fan of duplicating information that is readily available
>     anyway - be it as name and reg in the of_node directory.

I'm not a big fan of this either for the above reasons.