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#1269
Originally Posted by Mentalist Traceur View Post
Well, on the devices I have which are constantly on Extras-devel, I've found the UI perfectly fine. I don't really have anything stand out in my mind as particularly bad/unintuitive about it. Well, that Automated Keyset Search or whatever - it's a bit unclear just from looking at it how it's supposed to work. But I suspect if I just started fiddling with it, I'd figure it out pretty quickly.
Thank you! I'm really not a UI guy, and so I've always been nervous that what works for me may be completely off for the public at large. (Which is why I always want to at least get the documentation straight before pushing anything up...)

1. Separate it out into two packages, "pierogi" for the actual executable, conffiles, etc, and "pierogi-data" (nice, general naming that I see Debian packages use all the time) or "pierogi-keysets" or something more explicit like that, for the actual keyset data.
Ah, well, that's the thing -- in Pierogi, the keysets are part of the actual executable. Looking at, say, an average LIRC config file, you might think that a keyset is a large, complicated beast; but the LIRC is protocol-agnostic, and does nothing but count raw IR pulses. Once you understand the protocol that a device is using, all you're left with is at most a few dozen integers -- one for each button on the given remote. I really saw no reason not to enter these directly into the code...

2. You could have pierogi automatically check for keyset updates and download new keysets.
Ah, well, the problems with the QtIrreco app kind of steered me away from this path. Actually, I really am not a fan of most modern remote-control apps, even if all they are doing is downloading advertisements; I really think a simple tool like this should be fully independent, and work without needing to access the net for anything.

But yeah, I am looking at this concept for other projects...

[edit]But if they are hard-coded into the binary right now, then I would argue it would be must better from a design perspective to split them off regardless of what you did with the packaging for the repos, so that complexity is justified and ought to be in there anyway.[/edit]
For most projects, I would agree; however, given that IR keysets are tiny static sets of integers (as the devices being controlled generally do not support modifications to their controls), I still believe that in this case there's no downside to simply adding them directly to the code.

So in short, I think your extras-testing criteria needs to be that it's "nearly-perfect" - you just need to think it's "probably not more broken than it was".
Hmm. Alright, well, they do say that "perfect is the enemy of good". Let me get the documentation into a relatively good shape, and push up what I've got...
 

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