[BRLTTY] make drivers a library?

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Yet another person on the NVDA list wanted to re-implement a driver for
> some braille device because he doesn't want to have to run both brltty
> and nvda at the same time.

Erm... Why?

> Of course, it's a better thing to use the brlapi facility as this
> permits to run several readers, dedicated applications, etc. but for
> the casual user this seems superfluous considering the difficulty of
> installing both brltty and nvda (yes, I believe we got to a very simple
> way to achieve that, but two applications is still too much for casual
> users).

I don't buy that for a minute.  Windows has plenty of installer kits to 
chose from, making all the underlying 
programs/services/components/whatnot bundled and installed together with 
no distinction unless the user really wants to dig.  Most games will 
package DirectX and install it unless there is already a newer version 
installed already for example.

Also, if NVDA relies on BRLTTY to work properly then it should ensure 
BRLTTY is running and start it otherwise, all by itself.  This is not 
rocket science.

> As a result, I yet more and more believe that brltty should export its
> drivers through a library too, even with an simple interface similar
> to libbrlapi/libbraille.

Are they thinking the same about the Windows speech API?

> Else I fear dispersion of hardware support
> efforts.

If the effort needed to make proper integration of BRLTTY/BRLAPI for a 
better NVDA user experience is greater than plain driver duplication, 
then I'm afraid that making a proper library interface would be an even 
greater effort (except that the effort is now shifted to BRLTTY 
developers instead).

> What do people think?

I think this is the wrong solution for a valid issue.


Nicolas