Hey,
Following your comment on the wlug wiki at http://www.wlug.org.nz/SysFs, I was wondering if you had any more info on what sysfs is being replaced with, and what the motives were? I've looked at all the obvious places, but don't feel like trawling through lkml archives.
I could be wrong about all this (I don't follow lkml) but I believe the deprecated bit is not sysfs itself, just a number of directories under the /sys tree. Reading the kernel docs for SYSFS_DEPRICATED This option creates deprecated symlinks such as the "device"-link, the <subsystem>:<name>-link, and the "bus"-link. It may also add deprecated key in the uevent environment. None of these features or values should be used today, as they export driver core implementation details to userspace or export properties which can't be kept stable across kernel releases. If enabled, this option will also move any device structures that belong to a class, back into the /sys/class hierarchy, in order to support older versions of udev. If you are using a distro that was released in 2006 or later, it should be safe to say N here. The problem is that old versions of HAL depend on these files and won't work without them. This is the reason for the "distro released in 2006 or later", all new versions of HAL work just fine without them.