Hi Shawn,

On 1/8/21 11:49 AM, Shawn Nock wrote:
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/libs/ell/ell.git/commit/?id=e129cb4cd2270f308c1564e75859672643dd902b
> 
> I cannot find any discussion of the removal on the mailing list archive and as far as I can tell the patch wasn't sent to the list before commit. The commit says that there are no users. We use the plugin functionality.

Indeed, there was no mailing list announcement.  In retrospect, we should have 
done so.

Note that we have not made any API/ABI stability promises as yet, so ell is 
still a moving target.  We have had no real reason to do so as we were not aware 
of any ell users outside of the core projects that we support (iwd, bluez, 
mptcpd, etc).

We have been wanting to make this particular change for a while.  The catalyst 
for the decision were reports of build issues on certain linkers with iwd/ell. 
Since we were about to make a release, instead of adding hot-fixes, which were 
objected to by some developers, we decided to take the whole thing out.  This 
was done after consulting with all known users of ell on IRC.

> 
> I can, of course, maintain this functionality separately. Plugin functionality is a fairly common pattern and while the current implementation isn't particularly nice, I did enjoy not having to re-implement it.

As you point out, the current implementation wasn't that hot, and there were no 
users among the core projects that we support.

If you want to add this back in, then it probably should be made into its own 
mini-library.  Something like 'ell-plugin'; any users would have to explicitly 
opt-in to use it rather than it being a part of the core ell library.

Regards,
-Denis