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I just see the problem of outdated information as quite serious.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 But the issue of outdated information needs to have a satisfactory solution.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