On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:35 AM, Stefan Tauner
<stefan.tauner@student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
i had the idea to implement an expiration date for flashrom binaries
(i.e. a time bomb). in the case distributions ship ancient binaries
(in the future) this may save a bunch of hardware.
i noted two reactions back then when i proposed this idea on IRC in my
todo.txt:
<twice11> If I validated software to work on some system, I don't want
it to suddenly break one year later.
<agaran> twice11: but kind notify that version you use is %d days old
(and repeated every multiple of time or 100days or so) could be nice
Interesting idea, but I have to agree with twice11 here. I do not want a version of flashrom that works fine on the systems I'm supporting to suddenly start breaking scripts or throwing superfluous warnings to users and testers. This will definitely cause headaches for ODMs/OEMs and commercial Linux system vendors :-(
IMHO it would be more useful to try and get generic distros to a) not include a flashrom binary by default and b) when a user installs it manually, fetch and compile sources from SVN.
As for the patch itself, if this idea moves forward then it would be nice to isolate the code a bit more so it can be easily removed. Rather than placing it in print_version(), I recommend creating another function which would be called from cli_classic(). Something like:
--- cli_classic.c (revision 1367)
+++ cli_classic.c (working copy)
@@ -146,6 +146,7 @@
print_version();
print_banner();
+ print_expiration();
if (selfcheck())
exit(1);
where print_expiration() contains the code that prints warning.