I know this has been mentioned before, and it's not really that big of a
deal (and like most people I suspect, I'd much rather see 8PSK support
in there sooner rather than later), but I literally cringe every time I
see this patch go by where it adds a structure called
"dvb_frontend_params" to a set of structures including
"dvb_frontend_parameters" -- can't we please come up with something
better than that? It's totally ambiguous and tells you nothing about the
relationship between the two structures. The associated ioctl names
aren't much better. The new, extended version of FE_SET_FRONTEND is
called FE_SET_PARAMS? Does that make sense?
There's a few ways people usually handle the addition of an interface
which subsumes or extends another:
* If the interface is a superset of the previous, something like
"dvb_frontend_parameters_ext" and "FE_SET_FRONTEND_EXT", etc. is an
obvious choice. Nobody should have any trouble figuring out what that means.
* If the interface is just a new revision of the previous, something
like "dvb_frontend_parameters2" is another choice. Maybe not everybody
is accustomed to seeing interfaces with versions on them like this, but
at least it does have some direct indication that the two interfaces are
related, and which one is more capable.
* Syntactical permuations of the above.
One could be concerned that calling an interface "*_ext" or "*_new" is
not scalable, since at some point you might have an even more extended
or newer interface available, and then what do you call it? In this
case, however, the proposal has plenty of structure padding for future
expansion, and I doubt the need will arise for a new frontend ioctl
interface for a long time. Maybe V4 will be back in favor by then? :-)
But in any case, just about anything would be better than what the patch
has right now -- related structures which have confusingly similar
names, and related ioctls which have totally unrelated names. Again, I
have no interest in starting a lengthy discussion about this, as it
seems like this patch has already seen more than its share of that. I
just want to stop cringing, please!
/Yeasah
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