Re: Exposing device ids and driver names

[Nathaniel McCallum <nathaniel@natemccallum.com>]

On 10/01/2009 02:23 PM, Stefan Richter wrote:
> Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
>> On 10/01/2009 01:47 PM, Stefan Richter wrote:
>>> Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> [...]
>>>> The second tool, related to the first, is a program which runs on
>>>> Windows and scans for a user's hardware and tells them which distro will
>>>> best support their hardware.
> [...]
>>> Hardware support also depends on userland:  Udev rules, libraries,
>>> application programs.
>>>
>>> Even if you ignore that for now and only look at the kernel part of
>>> hardware support:  Beyond "doesn't have a matching driver" and "does
>>> have", there is a large and impossible to track grey area of "has a
>>> poorly working driver" and "has a perfectly working driver".
>
> There are even more factors for how well something works or even whether
> it works at all:  It may even depend on combinations of two pieces of
> hardware, e.g. bus adapter and device on that bus.  It may depend on
> device firmware revisions.
>
>> Yes, I'm aware of this and will account for it as best as I am able.
> [...]
>> you are correct that we cannot predict 100% of user
>> experience.  But 70% is a huge improvement over 0%.
>
> So, this 2nd tool can't literally say which distribution supports a
> device best.  It can mostly just list which distributions contain a
> matching kernel driver.

I never said that.  What I said is that I will "do my best." This will 
include using other data sources, such as Xorg drivers, libusb drivers, 
user feedback, etc.

Nathaniel