Re: [FFADO-devel] reverse engineering is evil...

[Heikki L. <hol...@cs...>]

Nicolas Joyard kirjoitti:
> Hi Joern,
> 
> I guess the only appropriate question here would be :
> * do you want to donate your developer time to help people get their 
> hardware working on unsupported platforms ?
> 
> Because you have to keep in mind that helping to reverse-engineer these 
> devices will eventually help FOS audio software become as good as other 
> software. More people using it mean more bug reports, more testing 
> environments, more enhancement suggestions...

I'm not sure I agree with this. Reverse engineered drivers, at least the 
a/v ones more often than not seem to be, well, crap. I do respect the 
effort people put into reverse engineering, but it's really hard to 
achieve good quality without the specs in some cases. Not to speak of 
the amount of work it takes to have a working reverse engineered 
driver.. I think, the topic starter had a point. Why bash your head to a 
wall when there's choice? If there wasn't choice, then, of course, using 
desperate means would make some sense.

The user doesn't care how (painstakingly) a driver was made - if a piece 
of hardware is said to be supported, the user might just go out and buy 
it and then find out later that the "support" was actually a very narrow 
reverse engineered case. This leads to disappointment and not 
necessarily any of the positive effects you mention.

Speaking from my own experience, I would really have appreciated a big 
fat warning in kernel config/whatever on drivers that are reverse 
engineered (and not *rigorously* tested.) IMHO, Linux's hardware support 
looks too good on the outside.

-- Heikki Lindholm