On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 07:29:36AM +0200, Jukka Marin wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 09:01:06PM -0600, David Young wrote:
> > Please, fix the applications!  A user should not have to "hunt" on a
> > dial with 256 settings for the 16 settings that matter.  Neither should
> > a computer program.
> 
> The applications should never need to know the hardware details.  The
> current implementation of broken, IMNSHO.
> 
> Or do think every single programm running under X should handle different
> screen depths, resultions, gfx accelerators, monitor types etc. by itself?
> I think it's the job of X and the display drivers to do that.  I also think
> it's the job of the audio drivers to hide the hardware differences as much
> as possible.

Jukka, what is it about the broken implementation that is broken?
I may not disagree with you that it is broken.  There was a discussion
about some god-awful stateful implementation---I don't remember how that
was resolved.

We disagree that the way to fix it is with scaling.  The way to fix it
is to tell apps, "I am a volume control.  I am adjustable in the range
[0, hwmax].  I will clamp settings greater than hwmax or less than 0."
Let the apps decide whether to scale or to provide discrete settings,
but do *not* make them represent that there are more settings than there
really are, and then conceal the dismal truth from them.

(BTW, X provides descriptions of the graphics hardware capabilities to
apps that are *much* richer than the volume-control interface I describe.)

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933