On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Hans Werner <HWerner4@xxxxxx> wrote: >> ... and yes, many people understand you. > > :) Thanks to everyone who replied so far. I am glad people care about this. > >> > We know all about the "coding in your free time" and we can only have >> > the highest respect for that, but the drivers are completely abandonded, >> > and that's how we feel, too. >> >> No, and that's my HVR4000 code you're talking about (and the good work >> of Darron Broad, which was then picked up by Igor). The driver is >> marginalized, it's not abandoned. > > I hope your and Darron's drivers (http://dev.kewl.org/hauppauge) are not seen as > marginalized. The multifrontend (MFE) patch by you and Darron is the driver that I > actually *use* for watching TV. It works nicely with Kaffeine without modification. And I, > for one, appreciate your sane approach and the simplicity of the techniques you used to > add DVB-S2 support (using sysctls for the SFE driver, and wrapping two ioctls to pull in > extra parameters for the MFE driver). If the kernel API is changed sensibly it should be > easy and quick to adapt your drivers to fit in. > >> The HVR4000 situation is under review, the wheels are slowly turning.... > If you are able to say anything about that I would be very interested. > > Now, to show how simple I think all this could be, here is a PATCH implementing what > I think is the *minimal* API required to support DVB-S2. > > Notes: > > * same API structure, I just added some new enums and variables, nothing removed > * no changes required to any existing drivers (v4l-dvb still compiles) > * no changes required to existing applications (just need to be recompiled) > * no drivers, but I think the HVR4000 MFE patch could be easily adapted > > I added the fe_caps2 enum because we're running out of bits in the capabilities bitfield. > More elegant would be to have separate bitfields for FEC capabilities and modulation > capabilities but that would require (easy) changes to (a lot of) drivers and applications. > > Why should we not merge something simple like this immediately? This could have been done > years ago. If it takes several rounds of API upgrades to reach all the feature people want then > so be it, but a long journey begins with one step. This will break binary compatibility with existing apps. You're right -- those apps will work with a recompile, but I believe that as a whole, the linux-dvb kernel and userspace developers alike are looking to avoid breaking binary compatibility. Regards, Mike _______________________________________________ linux-dvb mailing list linux-dvb@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.linuxtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-dvb
