libusb future

Hi all,

As Johannes Erdfelt wrote in a mail earlier today, I'm now in control of
the libusb project. libusb development has been stalled for several
months, mainly because Johannes does not currently have enough time to
work on the project.

I use libusb-0.1 in one of my projects, but decided to drop it as it was
lacking some functionality I wanted. I could not find any equivalent
libraries offering the feature set I was hoping for, so I sat down to
write my own USB access library. We later realised that the goals and
design principles of my own library fit in with the original libusb
ideas rather well, so it makes sense for my work to become the future
libusb.

Many thanks to Johannes for being open/flexible in this respect --
libusb is clearly his baby but he has been very co-operative in
transferring it given the project inactivity. I'll do my best to take
good care of it :)

A little about me: I'm a Linux kernel contributor and have worked on
various USB device drivers. I also lead Gentoo's kernel team. My current
project which inspired the new USB library is a fingerprint scanning
project: http://www.reactivated.net/fprint/

My plans for libusb:

1. I will undertake basic maintenance of the widely-used libusb-0.1
codebase - I'll apply simple patches and do infrequent releases.

2. The name of the existing libusb-1.0 development branch will be erased
from our brains (I'll leave the code in place for reference, but I do
not think this development branch will go anywhere). *zap*

3. I will rename my new USB library project (fpusb) to "libusb-1.0". In
other words, this can be viewed as a complete rewrite of libusb
(although with various borrowed code/ideas). The goals are basically to
provide asynchronous I/O capabilities in a lightweight library, while
offering poll fd's for decent mainloop integration. You can read a bit
more about my efforts here:
http://www.reactivated.net/fprint/wiki/Fpusb

I will elaborate more on the goals of libusb-1.0 in a future mail. Some
portability will be lost in the short term (it'll be Linux only), but I
hope to attract interest from developers experienced with USB I/O layers
of other operating systems, and with their help it will hopefully become
as portable as libusb-0.1. (If such people are interested already, I'd
suggest not doing anything more than looking at the code for now, give
the design a bit more time to settle first).

Things may start a little slowly as I have exams coming up very soon,
but things will progress given some time :)
I will send further mails over the next week or so describing my plans
for each branch in more detail.

Thanks,
Daniel

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