I agree that with hex values the driver is much harder to read and
debug (as a casual developer). that's part of the reason the radeon
driver is so well developed and feature-rich. however, I'd say that
most drivers in xfree86 use hex values rather than symbolic names so
symbolic names are hardly the norm. the nv driver is no more obscured
than the trident or 3dlabs, etc. drivers.
Alex
--- "Mike A. Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Thomas Winischhofer wrote:
>
> >> I suppose that is fair enough. I'm trying to debug an annoying
> >> problem in the driver for some users having problems, and seeing
> >> hexadecimal registers everywhere instead of symbolic names is
> >> very frustrating.
> >
> >Mike, I really can't imagine how symbolic names would help you if
> you
> >don't have hardware docs. (Well, unless one uses names like
> >BIT_7_IS_FOR_INTERLACE_BIT_6_IS_FOR_DOUBLESCAN_BITS_5_4_ARE....)
> >
> >For me as a developer, if I have the choice between for example
> >
> > SetReg(Part2Port,0x43,0x27);
> >
> >or
> >
> > SetReg(Part2Port,RTVFILCNT,0x27);
> >
> >I will certainly go for the first variant.
> >
> >Datasheets usually are sorted by register number. Using the number
> >instead of a name saves me from 1) remembering the symbolic name I
> or
> >the datasheet gave the register ("Was that with '_' or without in
> the
> >middle? Did I use caps?"), and 2) grepping BOTH the driver AND the
> >datasheet (or my defs.h) every time I check or debug stuff.
> >
> >Just my humble $.2
>
> Having zero datasheet, but having symbolic names is more likely
> to give useful information than is 0x43. It isn't a substitute
> for full documentation by far, but it is better than nothing,
> especially if you are a volunteer trying to fix something for
> someone else, the more information you have the better.
>
> Using non symbolic names is like surfing the web with IP
> addresses only, the obvious difference to this analogy being that
> domain names don't always remain pointing to the same IP address.
>
>
> --
> Mike A. Harris
>
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