[BRLTTY] Unconventional key bindings was Re: Many problems and questions on brltty for android

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by erik burggraaf on 2013/05/13 at 11:57 -0400]

>At the request of Mario, on key bindings.

I'll be definitely hanging onto your message for guidance.

Please understand that I had two choices. One was to wait until BRLTTY support 
on Android was perfect, but it'd then only be perfect insofar as my limited 
understanding of the requirements of all Android users is concerned. The other, 
which I chose, was to get BRLTTY working well enough on Android, and then 
release it, quite early, in roder to get feedback so that further development 
would occur more correctly.

So, yes, you can accuse me of having released a pile of crap. For that, I'm 
guilty as charged. The reality, though, is that releasing it that way was 
intentional so that useful feedback would make the eventual product much 
better.

I'll also take this opportunity to reiterate what another developer has already 
said. Please use a tone which is a bit more humble. You aren't perfect, either, 
and your claims that we've outright done things wrong might just be wrong 
themselves. Clearly describing changes which you'd like to see is one thing, 
but addressing us in a way which effectively accuses us of being a pack of 
ignorant software developers who know absoutely nothing about what we're doing 
is quite another. I don't really care what you accuse me, personally, of, but I 
won't stand for you speaking to any of our other team members that way. I 
personally think you owe them all a huge apology, and I truly hope I never feel 
the need to speak this way to you ever again.

Now, back to being nice to you:

Our goal is to do two-dimensional rendering. That'll come. It may not mean that 
everything will be packed together on each line, though, as an attempt to 
retain reasonably accurate vertical alignment as much as possible is what a 
user, in my opinion, really needs. That being said, the actual braille laout is 
done by an object which can have as many implementations as there are 
imaginations, and being able to switch between them will eventually be easy.

I disagree with you insofar as routing keys are concerned. Having every single 
routing key above the same object do the very same thing is incredibly 
wasteful. Giving each of them its own function, at least to me, makes a lot 
more sense. Just because you haven't seen that done before doesn't make it 
wrong. Maybe it's just difficult for you to accept something which ultimately 
is better. Again, that being said, if lots of users agree with you then we can 
always make this behaviour configurable by the user. Then we'll just have to 
debate what the default should be. :-)

Those are two of the bigger points of yours which have immediately come to mind 
while writing this reply. I'll keep all of your comments, though, regardless of 
their tone, and shall indeed consider each and every one of them.

Please give me a bit of time, though, as my personal time is currently being 
consumed by a few other rather important issues. One is my wife being given a 
lot of nasty medical treatments in an attempt to deal with an aggressive form 
of cancer. The other is my having been laid off and needing to look for a new 
source of income in order to support myself, my wife, eight (of thirteen) 
children who are still here at home, and a few grandchildren. Supporting this 
many dependents will burn up my severance pay soon enough, and then who knows 
where we'll all be.

I don't normally dump my personal problems on others. In this case, however, I 
felt it to be necessary to let you know just how much might be behind the 
scenes in the lives of those you make demands of and expect instant service 
from. No one is paying any of us to do this work. We do it out of love for it, 
but, on occasion, the realities of our lives do get a bit in the way.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario   | http://Mielke.cc/bible/
EMail: dave at mielke.cc | Canada  K2A 1H7   | http://FamilyRadio.com/