[Kde-hardware-devel] Using Multiple backends

[Kevin Ottens]

Le Mardi 14 Février 2006 13:32, Christopher Blauvelt a écrit :
> I've started to implement a gphoto2 backend for camera support.

Is there something we could look at?

> What mechanism is planned to use multiple backends at the same time. 
> Currently, as far as I can tell, when the backend is loaded it unloads
> whatever was loaded before.  This doesn't matter right now since there is
> only one backend. [...]

What is currently developed is about hardware discovery and gathering 
information from devices not about accessing them (I state this because with 
gphoto2 you can do both if it's about cameras, so we should make clear what 
we're talking about).

I think that allowing to have several backends handling hardware discovery at 
the same time would only add extra complexity for no real gain. As you 
stated, they might overlap in features (and for sure they will)... that's 
really asking for troubles (which backend to choose? when? what to do if two 
backends disagree? etc.).

I really don't see the need for having two backends in parallel for hardware 
discovery. If something is missing from a backend it should be fixed in my 
opinion, no need to add extra complexity IMHO.

Hence why there's nothing planned to load several hardware discovery backends 
at the same time.

> As a note, yes gphoto2 can use hal as a detection system.  It does have the
> ability to detect cameras on it's own.  This allows it to be used when hal
> is not available or not desired.

Well, when gphoto2 would be used as a backend for hardware discovery you could 
only detect cameras, when hal is used as a backend we can discover more 
devices (cameras included). Sorry if I miss something, but in your opinion 
what would be the gain to have them in parallel?

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."
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