// the take
usbutils is the lsusb/usb-devices/usbreset toolkit that ships with basically every Linux distro, maintained directly by Greg Kroah-Hartman. It's for anyone doing USB device debugging or driver work on Linux/BSD — not something you integrate as a library, it's a CLI you already have installed via your package manager.
Maintained by one of the most reliable people in the kernel ecosystem, so bus-factor and longevity aren't concerns most projects this small have. Dependency footprint is tiny and well-scoped (libusb + libudev only). The test suite (brat/TAP-based) actually covers real CLI option combinations across lsusb, lsusb.py, usb-devices, and usbhid-dump rather than being a token gesture. CI runs CodeQL, codespell, and clang-format across five distro environments, which is more rigor than most C utilities this size bother with.
GitHub is explicitly the maintainer's last-choice mirror behind kernel.org and sourcehut — contributions are expected via email with a Signed-off-by DCO trailer, so GitHub PRs are a secondary path at best and may sit unreviewed. It's diagnostic tooling only, not a library: there's no API surface to build on, so 'adopting' it just means apt/pacman/brew install, not a dependency decision. The descriptor-parsing code (desc-defs.c, desc-dump.c) handles data coming off a physical USB device, which is the classic attack surface for malformed-descriptor bugs — CodeQL helps but doesn't eliminate that class of risk. No Windows support, so it's a non-option outside Linux/BSD hosts.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →