Devin Heitmueller wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Devin Heitmueller
> <devin.heitmueller@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wow, well this literally kept me up all night pondering the various options.
>>
>> Manu's idea has alot of merit - providing a completely new API that
>> provides the "raw data without translation" as well as a way to query
>> for what that format is for the raw data, provides a great deal more
>> flexibility for applications that want to perform advanced analysis
>> and interpretation of the data.
>>
>> That said, the solution takes the approach of "revolutionary" as
>> opposed to "evolutionary", which always worries me.  While providing a
>> much more powerful interface, it also means all of the applications
>> will have to properly support all of the various possible
>> representations of the data, increasing the responsibility in userland
>> considerably.

Not necessarily, the application can simply chose to support what
the driver provides as is, thereby doing no translations at all.

The change to the application is rather quite small, as you can see
from the quick patch and a modified femon.

>From what you see, it should be that simple.

>> Let me ask this rhetorical question: if we did nothing more than just
>> normalize the SNR to provide a consistent value in dB, and did nothing
>> more than normalize the existing strength field to be 0-100%, leaving
>> it up to the driver author to decide the actual heuristic, what
>> percentage of user's needs would be fulfilled?
>>
>> I bet the answer would be something like 99%.

You can really scale values to dB only if it is in some dB scale.
Looking at the drivers there are hardly a few drivers that do in dB.


If it were to be standardized in to "one standard format" i would
rather prefer to have the format what the API currently suggests:
That is to have a floor - ceiling value, without any units, rather
than one which forces all drivers to dB (in this case the drivers
which do not will be considered broken), the reason being this
hardly helps a few drivers, while the reverse holds true for all.

Regards,
Manu