Hi!
It seems we have to decide where we want to go with batctl. Until now batctl was not mandatory to operate the batman-adv kernel module. batctl extended the modules functionality and made things easier to configure but remained optional.
Personally, I like it a lot that way because it does not create unnecessary dependencies.
Ack.
It can become an uphill battle if you want to keep your kernel and its configuration tools in sync. Everyone that tried to use oprofile knows what I'm talking about (or the wireless tools to name another example).
So, the question is whether we want to make batctl the almighty tool that we always depend on or are we trying to find alternative solutions to avoid that dependency ?
I'd opt for the latter.
One option for the case at hand might be debugfs (http://lwn.net/Articles/115282/). It is another filesystem which needs to be mounted seperately - there we can output whatever we want (unlike /proc). It would be possible to create virtual files for the dot draw / json / raw output (raw means the neutral format suggested by Andrew).
Soon we also will have to decide what to do with routing log as we can't "spam" the system log with our data. Again, debugfs seems like a good solution. That does not need to be decided now but could be a consistent path towards mainline integration.
Seems like the way to go.
Cheers, Elektra