From: veit@du9ds3.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de (Holger Veit)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: XFree86 problems (keyboard hangs overnight)
Date: 16 Nov 92 08:05:27 GMT
Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung
Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: du9ds3.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de

In <STARK.92Nov14094333@sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu> stark@cs.sunysb.edu (Gene Stark) writes:

[...]
>>I am becoming quite tired now to to say that all of this is covered by "codrv". 
>>Get the keycap-0.1.1.tar.Z stuff from ftp.uni-duisburg.de (134.91.100.14).
>>Read README*, FAQ.ddmmyy, and BUGLIST.ddmmyy there.
>>
>>Holger

>I wasn't aware of this before the recent flurry of postings -- thank you.
>I did in fact ftp your package (from ref.tfs.com) a few days ago and read the
>stuff you suggest.  I thank you for making this available, but in view of the
>fact that it is still incomplete (according to the documentation) and appears
>at first glance to be a significant deviation from the stock system and
>patches, and a corresponding hassle to install (and to back out changes if
>something goes wrong), I decided that I probably don't want to install your
>driver at this juncture.

"Incomplete" is quite a relative term. It is not incomplete in that it misses
essential things or will crash often (although "essential" is relative as well).
Some hints what you might expect in future releases:
- virtual terminal screens
- different text resolutions
- more utilities, e.g. to capture fonts and convert keymaps from xmodmap
- ??? ;-)

Codrv is indeed a new package, which is, like other software (see buglist.0.9),
not directly integrated into the patchkit line. But as I said, if you
omit the "pccons" related fixes of the patchkit that come along some time,
there are no problems with codrv, in contrast to ports and modifications,
which are based on "pccons". There is a tradeoff between new features and
portability. However, I must admit, that the way of installation, that is
used now in keycap, is not very user friendly. This marks a general problem
with the patchkit: It must be maintained from a central side. I currently
have about 50-60 patches pending, which are not yet covered by the patchkit,
some of them are important in my area, one is included in the keycap-kit.
Should I wait forever until the fixes will flow into the patchkit?

>Before I started running X386, I was using a version of keycap that came with
>a console driver posted by Hellmuth Michaelis.  The key mapping was very nice,
>but I wasn't happy with the console driver, which tended to crash my system.

>When X386 came out, and Terry's patchkit, I went back to the stock console
>driver with patches applied.  I am currently very reluctant to install a large
>console driver with lots of bells and whistles, when I use XFree86 almost all
>the time.  I would rather have some small, reliable patches to make the bell
>and keyboard lights work than a whole big thing with a lot of baggage I don't
>have any use for.

>							- Gene Stark

It may be that the incompatibility problem between existing software and
the VT100 ESC sequences of hm's vgadrv is still in it. I myself didn't
succeed in crashing the system with codrv yet.

The idea of codrv was the avoidance of these "small, reliable patches".
Natural growth of software was rarely a good base of software development.
You might not need keyboard overloading, others might, you may require
bell and keyboard fixes, others do not, but they might want to have other
"bells and whistles". So how would you find an integration platform (I
guess you won't, or at least haven't thought about it yet)? Codrv is
a product for the future, not for current restricted requirements. This is
why it has been marked "incomplete".

Holger
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