First time subsurace usage surprises

Linus Torvalds torvalds at linux-foundation.org
Tue Jul 31 15:11:42 PDT 2012


On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Lutz Vieweg <lvml at 5t9.de> wrote:
>
> (I don't like that ~/.gconf/apps/subsurface/ stuff too much, why should
> an application write some defaults deep into a directory structure that
> is named after some GUI toolkit...?)

I think gconf is horrible too, but the alternative would be to write
some config parser for us.

We did that for 'git' (and it's superior to any config file I've seen
elsewhere), and we could probably use that code, but it's not perfect
either.

> But my patch above suggests the name ".subsurface/divedata.xml" visibly
> to the user upon first start, that's better than nothing ;-)

So the reason I don't much like that is that this is a file that
people want to back up and keep track of across machines etc, so
making it some random file in a hidden subdirectory in your home
directory really smells like the wrong thing to do. *Much* too easy
for it to get lost.

> Two wires? The D9 plug has two male pins plus ground/shielding - that would
> be sufficient for one RX and one TX line, and thus "full duplex", theoretically...

Good for you - but all the Suunto wires *I* have seen (ie
Gekko/Vyper/Vyper Air) are two pins only. No separate grounding, since
the shell is all plastic/rubber anyway - there really is just two
exposed metal connectors from the computer. So the protocol is very
much "ground+data".

In fact, the thing is even worse than that. The original Suunto cable
was just a direct attach to the serial port, using DTR for the
positive side. See for example

   http://videodive.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/interface-suunto.pdf

for the conversion logic.

                Linus


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