Re: [PATCH] dt-bindings: leds: Mark label property as deprecated

From: Jacek Anaszewski
Date: Mon Dec 05 2022 - 13:44:34 EST


Hi all,

On 12/2/22 00:41, Marek Vasut wrote:
On 11/30/22 20:19, Rob Herring wrote:
On Fri, Nov 25, 2022 at 10:26:30PM +0100, Marek Vasut wrote:
On 11/22/22 13:23, Pavel Machek wrote:
Hi!

Hi,

Mark the label property as deprecated as it is mentioned
in the description.

Lets do it the other way around. Functions (etc) don't really provide
good enough description of LED, and label is still needed.

Can you please provide a clear explanation which property or approach is the
correct one for new DTs ?

So far, the documentation states that "label" is deprecated, and users
should replace it with "function" and "color".

'function' is what activity/operation the LED is associated with. It is
a fixed set of strings which s/w may use. It is a replacement for
'linux,default-trigger'.

Isn't this 'function' more of a standardized replacement for 'label' ?

Yes it is. Introduction of function and color properties aimed at standardizing LED naming. Before there was only 'label' used for that,
with DT node name as fallback if 'label' property was not provided.
With introduction of 'function' and 'color' label was deprecated in
the sense that if the former two are present, they are used for
composing the LED name.

In LED documentation [0] people are encouraged to use definitions from
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h to keep LED naming uniform.
It allows to avoid duplicates like "wlan" and "wifi".

$ git grep LED_FUNCTION_ include/
...
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h:#define LED_FUNCTION_PLAYER5 "player-5"
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h:#define LED_FUNCTION_ACTIVITY "activity"
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h:#define LED_FUNCTION_ALARM "alarm"
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h:#define LED_FUNCTION_BACKLIGHT "backlight"
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h:#define LED_FUNCTION_BLUETOOTH "bluetooth"
include/dt-bindings/leds/common.h:#define LED_FUNCTION_BOOT "boot"
...

Seems to me that ^ is closer to a "standardized" form of 'label' .

The LED subsystem does not infer any behavior of those LEDs based on their 'function' property as far as I can tell, at least not in the way 'linux,default-trigger' behaves.

'label' is what is printed next to the LED for a human to read. 'label'
can be anything and the OS shouldn't care what it is.

This part I understand. What is not clear to me is, why is 'label' being un-deprecated.

It shouldn't be. It seems to be Pavel's ad-hoc decision.

We newly have 'function', 'function-enumerator' and 'color' DT properties for LEDs, which seem to be standardized forms of describing what the LED is used for, which LED it is (if there are multiple), and color of that LED. This was previously described in the 'label' property, usually in free form of e.g. "beaglebone:green:usr2" .

They serve 2 different purposes.

[...]

[0] Documentation/leds/leds-class.rst
--
Best regards,
Jacek Anaszewski