btrfs-progs/libbtrfsutil/README.md
Omar Sandoval 23c01b3c1b libbtrfsutil: add Python bindings
The C libbtrfsutil library isn't very useful for scripting, so we also
want bindings for Python. Writing unit tests in Python is also much
easier than doing so in C. Only Python 3 is supported; if someone really
wants Python 2 support, they can write their own bindings. This commit
is just the scaffolding.

Signed-off-by: Omar Sandoval <osandov@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
2018-02-24 01:37:17 +01:00

1.7 KiB

libbtrfsutil

libbtrfsutil is a library for managing Btrfs filesystems. It is licensed under the LGPL. libbtrfsutil provides interfaces for a subset of the operations offered by the btrfs command line utility. It also includes official Python bindings (Python 3 only).

Development

The development process for btrfs-progs applies.

libbtrfsutil only includes operations that are done through the filesystem and ioctl interface, not operations that modify the filesystem directly (e.g., mkfs or fsck). This is by design but also a legal necessity, as the filesystem implementation is GPL but libbtrfsutil is LGPL. That is also why the libbtrfsutil code is a reimplementation of the btrfs-progs code rather than a refactoring. Be wary of this when porting functionality.

libbtrfsutil is semantically versioned separately from btrfs-progs. It is the maintainers' responsibility to bump the version as needed (at most once per release of btrfs-progs).

A few guidelines:

  • All interfaces must be documented in btrfsutil.h using the kernel-doc style
  • Error codes should be specific about what exactly failed
  • Functions should have a path and an fd variant whenever possible
  • Spell out terms in function names, etc. rather than abbreviating whenever possible
  • Don't require the Btrfs UAPI headers for any interfaces (e.g., instead of directly exposing a type from linux/btrfs_tree.h, abstract it away in a type specific to libbtrfsutil)
  • Preserve API and ABI compatability at all times (i.e., we don't want to bump the library major version if we don't have to)
  • Include Python bindings for all interfaces
  • Write tests for all interfaces