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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.
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.husing 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 tolibbtrfsutil) - 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)