[BRLTTY] Looking at iManufacturer and iProduct for generic USB devices?

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Mariusz, this is a follow-up for debian's bug

Bug#667616: brltty greedily grabs serial ports, ftdi_sio loses connection

Dave Mielke, on Sun 20 Nov 2016 14:14:43 -0500, wrote:
> [quoted lines by Samuel Thibault on 2016/11/20 at 19:25 +0100]
> 
> >Any progress on this?
> 
> No. The discussion stopped before I was convinced I knew exactly what was 
> wanted, and then I got involved in other stuff and forgot about it.
> 
> As I recall: The idea is to use those strings to help decide if a brltty driver 
> should claim a device or not. If a driver specifies a lsit of manufacturer 
> strings then one of them must match, and/or if a driver speifies a lsit of 
> product strings then one of them must match. Is that how you understand it?

Yes, that's the idea. Very most probably we'll want to include a list of
manufacturer strings, since there is very little probability that they
change much.

> My lingring concern is that, if this feature were being used by a driver, then 
> it'd stop recognizing a braille deivce if a slight change were made to those 
> strings.

Yes, that's why I said that this kind of detection could be made an
option. Typically by default brltty would not try to match these, but
for the cases where we want to check the matches, we'd enable the
option. I'm here thinking of auto-start of brltty on all standard
systems or installers. In these cases, you want to be sure that it's a
braille device plugged in.

> Maybe that's an invalid concetrn. Do you know if there's some kind of 
> understanding that those strings need to be stable or are they really just 
> intended/used for human readability?

I don't know. Perhaps you could discuss directly with the person who
raised the concern? I have Cc-ed him.

Samuel