Re: [MiNT] Detecting serial-devices

[joska@nuts.edu (Jo Even Skarstein)]

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:02:01 -0400 (EDT), Katherine Ellis wrote:

> a scanner program that you run once for all (unless you change machine),
> and writes the result into a /etc/files for example?
> How many times do you really upgrade your atari, and/or serial ports?
>
> So like that, for 5 min it could totally lock the machine (when scanning)
> who cares, but then you have a flat files with all the info wished.
>
> It is not fully 100% realtime, but probably more flexible.
> The only time you would need to run the scanner would be initialy, then if
> the file gets corrupted (plain ascii is quite easy to see), and when
> upgrading machine/hardware.

I don't like this idea. Firstly, such information depends more on drivers
than hardware, so every time you upgrade a driver you would have to make
sure to "scan" again. Secondly, to use this information from applications
you need some sort of API to access it. Is this easier than asking the
devices directly?

Speed isn't a problem either, this is not something you do thousands of
times every second. It's done when you start your program, or at most
every time you open a popup. And even then I can't imagine that reading
a file would be faster...


/*
** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
**
**    beer - maria mckee - atari falcon - babylon 5
*/