Re: Miscellaneous comments and questions

>A lot of the binaries are ports, which, of course, provide whatever level
>of
>helpfullness they happen to provide.
>
>For VSTa unique binaries, the "small and simple" philosophy applied while
>coding, but I have nothing against a clear and timely error message from a
>utility. So if you have particular ones which drive you crazy, just let me
>know (or submit patches, whichever you prefer) and I'll fix it up.
>
>My philosophy of smallness is allowed to follow (but trail!) general sizes
>of things in the industry. So, since disk and memory have doubled in
>average size several times since VSTa was first written, I'm OK with some
>growth in both kernel and commands. But my litmus test is still to ask "is
>this small and simple?", so I'm not looking to double, say, the size of the
>kernel!

I wasn't planning on increasing kernel size(smaller is better :-)) and I
wasn't even thinking about doubling the size of anything. :-)

The 'perm' error messages that I sometimes get when working in VSTa were
just frustrating. Add the fact that I have nowhere to check for command
options and that their are few man pages(and the fact that the mailing list
archives are not searchable) and I'm forced to post the most trivial
questions to this list(like my very simple question a few months ago about
starting the mouse server).

GNU utilities have a --help option that (usually) self documents the use of
that command. I was thinking something along those lines would be really
helpful. --help could list options available, very brief summary of the
options and other relevant parameters.

Adding a --help option would probably also reduce the number of simple and
repeat questions on the mailing list.

I also had a thought about the network driver issue. You mentioned after
someone created a 3com driver that you needed to devise some kind of scheme
to enable ka9q to use the various different cards that may be available on a
machine(I believe the name being looked up is currently hard coded in ka9q,
right? -> 'net/ne2000').

Why not just have the driver/servers themselves register generic interface
names? Instead of 'net/ne2000' (or something similar), register 'net/eth0'
as the first network card, 'net/eth1' as the second, etc.

A simple loop while registering a name for the server would simplify things
greatly for ka9q(in semi-pseudo code):

char *name = "net/eth0";
n = strlen(name)-1;

while(name[n] <= '9') {
        /* attempt to register name here, if successful, break */
        name[n]++;
}
printf("registered: %s\n",name);

Something similar to this would enable ka9q(or any other applications) to
use the drivers by just looking up the generic names instead of having to
know the name of the actual driver. Just a thought. :-)

Sincerely,
Sandro
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Received on Fri Feb 16 09:51:46 2001