[BRLTTY] BRLTTY in GRUB

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012, Vladimir '-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> On 15.03.2012 21:21, Dave Mielke wrote:
> > This isn't nearly enough. This, as I suspected, is barely enough to simply
> > attempt to write braille.

That should be good enough as an initial proof of concept, no?
Vladimir is certainly familiarizing himself with the code still.

> Samuel already said it: I just want to have something that works at least
> minimally to begin with. To make whole brltty at least compile would mean
> twice as much work.

But of course we want to get there eventually.  In order to make this 
not twice as much work, it is probably best if you don't attempt to do 
it all alone.

> >   The user won't be able to use the controls on his
> > braille device to do anything. No user will accept this. Well, if it's all
> > he has, then he might, but he'll also silently curse the tremendous lack of
> > support, and, yet again, be disappointed by those who don't truly understand
> > his needs.

Let's not forget the first goal which is to have a prototype only.  The 
full fledged solution won't come first.

> > > Following files I implement right now:
> > >   common = braille/brltty_wrap/timing.c;
> > > This file seems to be platform-specific and uses select().
> > Only a very small part of it. Duplicating a whole file like that, just
> > because
> > part of it is a problem, isn't right. It's far better to use #if on
> > HAVE_SELECT, and fill in how grub needs it done with, maybe, an #if for
> > GRUB.

Dave, I think you might have misunderstood Vladimir here.  I don't think 
he's advocating a fork of BRLTTY to be merged into grub.  That would be 
a really foolish thing to do, and a very suboptimal solution indeed.

However, "hacking" a solution first is still a good way to highlights 
problem areas, and therefore we can agree on the need to rework those 
areas afterwards.  No need to get confrontational over this.

On the other hand, good engineering practice suggests that things remain 
modular as much as possible to facilitate maintenance and sharing.  
This is therefore necessary for Vladimir and other grub developers to 
understand that it is in their best interest to work with us to define 
how interfaces between grub and BRLTTY could be developed.  Because 
BRLTTY already supports DOS, this should be easy to provide the 
necessary abstractions for supporting another non POSIX environment. 
Grub, being a GNU project, certainly has high standards, and I would be 
very surprised if they refused to do so.


Nicolas