by Kyle Machulis
There comes a time where you just have to admit to yourself that all you're doing is adding like, one or two functions to a libusb frontend, calling it a driver, and releasing it to the world. This library is my admission of that.
I have at least 4 projects that simply add a single function to libusb, or else use the exact same bastardization of the HID layer to communicate. Instead of copying the code everywhere, I've created libnputil. Now, libnputil isn't exactly a "library". It's really just source files that I include into other source files and do some preprocessor acrobatics with in order to create library specific symbols. While one would normally just use a damn library for this, 99% of the users of my libraries don't really care to link yet another library just to get the functionality of my drivers, and they very rarely change versions or functionality. With that in mind, I bypass the idea of library compilation and just move the symbols right on into the library itself. It still allows for the libraries below (libusb/windows ddk) to be switched out, but otherwise things look the same because I very, very rarely change how I do device selection and initialization at this level.
I really wouldn't recommend using this if you aren't me. This is just a utility library for me to keep my code sorted in a way that seems slightly but not really sane to me.