Bug#858510: ITP: ddcutil -- control monitor settings

[Sanford Rockowitz <rockowitz@minsoft.com>]

Stephen,

I'd very much appreciate your help as co-maintainer and sponsor.  This
is my first attempt to submit a package to debian.   ddcutil has been
packaged on OBS and Launchpad for some time now, but I spent hours this
morning lost in the proverbial "maze of twisty little passages, all
alike", trying to figure out how to submit the package. I'm sure there's
a lot of cruddy details to be fixed up.

The ddcci driver is an interesting project.   It hides the gory details
of building and sending DDC packets.  But there also seems to be a lot
of missing functionality: e.g. EDID reads on slave address x50, only a
few DDC commands are supported.    The ddccii driver   implementation of
the capabilities inquiry returns an error if any write/read sub-exchange
fails.  In my experience with marginal monitors, you need retry logic
for both the individual sub-exchanges and the entire meta exchange, what
ddcutil calls multi-part-exchanges - otherwise you just don't get lucky.

Because of the early experimentation, the layer that reads and writes
I2C packets is designed to be swapped, so it should be possible to use
ddcci as an alternative strategy.   However, ddcutil would still need to
use the i2c-dev interface for things the ddcci driver does not do, and
I'd prefer not to add a dependency on a driver that can't be relied on
to always be there. 

Given all these issues, I think the best relationship between ddcutil
and the ddcci driver would be to use ddcutil as a testing framework for
the driver.

I'll install the ddcci driver and play with it a bit. 

Sanford



On Sun, 26 Mar 2017 16:42:01 +0200 Stephen Kitt <skitt@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi Sanford,
>
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2017 19:11:38 -0400, Sanford Rockowitz
<rockowitz@minsoft.com>
> wrote:
> > * Package name : ddcutil
> > Version : 0.7.3
> > Upstream Author : Sanford Rockowitz <rockowitz@minsoft.com>
> > * URL : http://www.ddcutil.com
> > * License : GPL
> > Programming Lang: C
> > Description : control monitor settings
> >
> > ddcutil is a Linux program for querying and changing monitor
settings, such
> > as brightness and color levels.
> [...]
> > I am the developer and presently the sole maintainer. maintain it?
inside a
> > packaging team
>
> This is very cool, thanks for developing ddcutil! I’m the maintainer of
> ddcci-driver-linux, and if you’re looking for a co-maintainer (and
sponsor)
> for ddcutil I’d be up for it.
>
> Incidentally, is there any chance ddcutil could support the ddcci module?
>
> Regards,
>
> Stephen