[flashrom] [PATCH] warn the user if flashrom is x months old

[David Hendricks]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:35 AM, Stefan Tauner <
stefan.tauner at 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.


-- 
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
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