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Quickcam device driver for Linux
patrick@cs.virginia.edu,Internet writes:
>The device driver is either compatible or minimal in this case, but not
>both.
Huh?
>To provide a uniform interface, it's going to have to translate
>(and even resize or quanti
>ze!) the image before providing it as "raw"
>(since each device defines "raw" differently)
> output.
Why dont's you have a cross platform standard unix style device driver that
defines it's own standard output format in the API? This is not rocket
science. The standard device interface model is very flexible and very
efficient, I havn't heard one single good argument as to why it is
nessesary to avoid the standard unix style device interface model other
than we don't like debugging kernel drivers, this is not a very good reason
for developing down a strange and winding path.....I say bite the bullet,
design a proper device driver API including a standard "raw" output format
specification.
Can you imagine the chaos if all devices where interfaced with application
level plugins and patches you have to compile in and things like that? My
god, it would be like MS-DOS only worse!! Well, I just installed my new
hard drive controller, I guess I'll start re-compilling or re-plugging in
every application on my system that does hard drive
access!!!....geeze!!...Of course you wouldn't do that...so why do it with a
camera, what makes a camera so vastly different than any other type of
device that it has to be treated in this "special" way?....
>
>If you must write camera drivers, I would be in favor of makin
>g them
>device-specific. If you want to provide a common interface to
>applications, write
>a userspace daemon (or plug-in) for each device.
Why? Why don't we do this with ethernet cards or video cards or audio
cards or hard disk controller cards? Why is the QuickCam(tm) perceived to
be so different from any other type of device that they don't fit the
normal device interface model? Excuse me, but I just don't understand this
perception......
Mike Sharkey
X11 Development
SoftArc Inc.
msharkey@softarc.com