FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Driver support...

["Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marco Zanon <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> as I said to Michael privately, when OBOS will be beta it should 
> be good to "convince" some developers to help and join the 
> project with their drivers,
> I'm talking about people who published their works on BeBits.com 
> (e.g: the Realtek 8139, some ATI stuff, an Epson Stylus Color 
> driver, etc.),

Sure, some of these drivers would be cool to have! About the ATI stuff, 
Thomas Kurschel is already in our team (the author of the ATI Radeon 
driver) :-)

> by doing so we would increase the number of developers into OBOS 
> and a lot of work would be immediately done (on the other hand, 
> as far as I understood, it should not be too difficult for them 
> to port their work from BeOS to OBOS, right?),

There is no need to port them over - they will just work out of the 
box, even without any recompilation.

> p.s.: sorry for the silly question, but: is a driver *completely* 
> frontend independent? does writing an OBOS driver (for, let's 
> say, a camera) require to know in advance which program will be 
> used (BeCamera or another)?

Depends on what you're doing :-)
If you would only need read/write functions from a driver, it would be 
"frontend independent". But the standard approach is that every driver 
type defines a certain interface; all networking drivers share one 
interface, etc.
But if you write a driver specifically for one application, you can use 
whatever interface you want to.

Adios...
   Axel.