Bug#826329: brltty: Please make easier braille driver setting
Jean-Philippe MENGUAL <jpmengual@hypra.fr> writes:
> Today, braille display support is correct, but automate recognition is
> not warrantied
> at all. Either due to USB IDs, or because the driver needs additional
> parameters
> (e.g. Eurobraille), or because braille display needs serial ports (ttyS0
> or ttyUSB0),
> etc.
You've forgotten about Bluetooth, which also needs special
configuration. Pairing a bluetooth device on the console is quite an
involved task, see README.Bluetooth in Documents/ directory of brltty
source.
> Then, the user needs to change brltty.conf manually. Although this file
> is quite
> well documented, it's not convinient at all for an end-user.
Do you know that you can also put settings you are overriding
into /etc/xdg/brltty/brltty.conf ?
> Could we imagine Debian implements something to change this file through an
> user interface? The user just would do dpkg-reconfigure brlttty to
> change it.
We could implement a debconf interface for generating
/etc/xdg/brltty/brltty.conf, yes.
> I identify at least 4 important settings to "humanize": braille-driver,
> braille-device,
> braille-parameter, text-table.
>
> With capability to check several choices and, for devices, enter it manually
> (useful when serial device is ttyUSB0).
My question is, how much does this really help to make configuration of
a non-standard braille device easier? The user still needs to know the consequences
of their choices, like using ttyUSB0 over a native USB connection.
> Would it be possible to implement it?
The way to go about this would be to write a debconf interface which
makes these choices available, and which writes the state of the debconf
database to /etc/xdg/brltty/brltty.conf.
We've had such code already back in the brltty 3.0 days.
However, it was dropped because it got a little bit too complicated,
admitedly because we were trying to *modify* the configuration file,
which is quite a hard thing to do, if you try to do it right.
We probably need an additional debconf boolean variable which indicates
if the xdg config file should be written by debconf, or left alone for
the user to edit.
Most of the devices I see these days are USB, and are well autodetected
with the default settings in /etc/brltty.conf. I personally don't see
enough reason to implement this, although I guess I would be fine with
someone submitting a policy-compliant implementation of a debconf
interface to brltty.conf.
--
CYa,
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