On 6/6/07, Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx> wrote:
Maybe the status of support of a particular device should be
maintained by
software in the operating system itself. The user would have to
agree that
anonymous information would be sent to a public database about his
hardware/drivers.
This is what I proposed in the other thread related to this, and Jonas
has said similar in this thread. We should start documenting this
somewhere since many of us are coming up with the same ideas.
I just see the problem of outdated information as quite serious. I
agree
that a fully acurate and up to date database is very useful. But
the issue
of outdated information needs to have a satisfactory solution.
This is why I agree this should be primarily automated. The question
we need to ask is where is the information stored as to what hardware
a driver can handle? Where is this information most accurate? Inside
the driver, right?
So we should set up a system that when a driver is updated, the driver
database is updated as well. This could be done with some kind of
"driver probe" which works with the binary, or maybe a source level
tool which gets run at compile time. Of course the latter only works
for drivers with source that use the proper build tools.
Of course this discussion of driver updating opens a whole new can of
worms: software updates in general. I've thought about this a bit in
relation to Haiku, and at my previous job spent quite a bit of time
building and managing software updates, so I have some experience in
this area. But I have a feeling some people in the this community may
not want to add a Microsoft-style updates system to Haiku. I would
tend to agree on that. I have also found the Ubuntu updating to be a
bit annoying and too frequent. But nonetheless software does need to
be updated occasionally, and making it as easy as possible is a good
goal. But I digress. I can start another thread about this (probably
after reviewing the archives to see what has already been discussed.)
Regards,
Ryan
