[BRLTTY] Low-level BrlAPI questions

[Samuel Thibault]

Aura Kelloniemi, le jeu. 15 avril 2021 07:58:23 +0300, a ecrit:
> On 2021-04-15 at 02:43 +0200, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> > But we do not want to pad by default, since existing applications may
> > have been using it to perform partial updates.
> 
> To me it seems like if the number of code points in text does not match
> regionSize,

I was not talking about code points in text not matching regionSize, but
about code points (equal to regionSize) not matching the display size
(which is all we are talking about AIUI). Applications may want to do
this to perform partial display updates.

> > - add a flag field to brlapi_writeArguments_t, which requires bumping
> >   the soname ABI compatibility *and* protocol version.
> 
> Another option would be to introduce size values for the masks, in addition to
> the regionSize.

I do not really see the use of being able to pass different sizes.
That's most probably a sign of a bug in the application output preparing
code, which the programmer would rather want to catch.

> Also, this does not need to break the protocol, because padding can be applied
> in the C client library.

No, because the display may have changed size in between, so the padding
will not be enough.

>  > I believe it'd better be at an intermediate layer, to keep the BrlAPI
>  > protocol as simple as possible.
> 
> Yes, sure.

I don't think Dave was so sure about it :)

Samuel