On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 10:52:58AM -0500, Bryan W. Headley wrote:
David Dawes wrote:
On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 09:23:11AM -0500, Bryan W. Headley wrote:
David Dawes wrote:
The first part of the work I'm doing to improve the XFree86 configuration experience for users is now available. Some details about it, and a link to the source patch can be found at <http://www.x-oz.com/autoconfig.html>.
Have you looked at the Hal library, over at freedesktop.org?
Even the "0.0.1-pre" version hadn't been released when I'd finished most of the above work :-),
No criticism inferred, Dave.
None taken. Just pointing out that it wasn't there to look at at the time.
and the 0.1 version appears to only handle hot plugging of USB devices, which doesn't overlap at all with what I've done so far.
Done right, there'd be a single-source repository of all "iron" statically plugged or hot-plugged into the given machine. That'd free other systems like X or Cups from having to do too much of their own hardware recognition...
That said, if there IS a need for a configuration file, let's say, because you want to specify the active area of a tablet, or tell the video driver you DON'T want maximal resolution (or whatever), there's the need for describing/specifying the device you are addressing.
There is definitely a need for storing user preference and associated configuration information, and to bind it to specific devices. For longer term solutions the users shouldn't need to know or care about the specifics how you identify devices internally though.
Well, that's an interesting point. I agree with it, but now it brings up the responsibility of device-configuring mechanisms. Heretofore, we've used the config file for that (as well as inferred hardware discovery)
The next step is where I have been going with my tablet driver front-end: displays all the driver's parameters, lets the user query and program the driver. It doesn't persist it's settings anywhere, although that can easily be addressed.
The thing is, a unified device-configuring front-end would be better than having every driver writer roll their own. (I mean, we can follow Windows if we want, but why incur development risk by developing what essentially is several versions of the same thing?)
In such a world, the device driver would have to somehow describe what parameters it understands, what legal values may be assigned, and allow for a callback that would allow configuration setting and querying. Hmm.
Where and how that data is persisted is another question. Not a hard one, but...
-- ____ .:. ____ Bryan W. Headley - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
