[BRLTTY] Prompt matching.

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Aura Kelloniemi on 2018/11/26 at 16:59 +0200]

>I'm not missing the old behaviour. 

How many patterns have you, at this point, written? If you send them to me then
I could include them in brltty.conf as commented out examples.

By the way: brltty.conf is UTF-8 encoded so you can, for example, use literal
Greek letters (I think you mentioned Gamma). They'll work since pcre2 is being
used. For those who don't have pcre2 (during configure), it falls back to
pcre(1).

>I guess somebody could have use for the combination of the prompt finding
>stretegies. Then there probably should be an option like "Fallback to default
>prompt matching when regex fails". To me enabling such a thing would cause
>confusion.

there could be an option, but the question still is what shuld it default to. I
have two reasons for believing that it should default to enabled. They both
boil down to the importance I place on coding for average users who, I believe,
want to place much more attention on their jobs than on the intracacies of
interesting features of base applications.

First: A power user would know to turn it off if that's what he/she really
wants whereas a regular user might just add a pattern or two for special cases
and assume that, beyond those patterns, the original algorithm still works.

Second: The history of brltty, which has served it well, is that new features
have been added without upsetting old ones. So, now we can add prompt patterns
while the original behaviour still does work. The same kind of thinking
dictates that, if we add an option for enabling the original algorithm, then it
should default to on.

I really do believe that it's easy for experts to get all caught up in theory
while forgetting about practce. If the option deaults to on then an expert who
wants it off would say "oh, okay" and turn it off. If, however, it defaults to
off then I believe it could easily cause an average user to wonder what went
wrong.

Si here's a practical question: Has the fact that the original algorithm still
works actually caused you a problem?

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