For what it's worth... I would second the notion that the new behavior
be the default. Much higher likelihood that it would "just work."

On 02/27/2017 10:52 AM, Jon Elson wrote:
> On 02/27/2017 09:42 AM, John Kasunich wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 26, 2017, at 03:51 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
>>> Actually, I thought option 1 was the "best", but required a
>>> bit more code and more testing.
>>> Since I've discovered the offending line occurs in ONE and
>>> only one place in the whole driver (I think),
>>> then conditional compilation of one copy of the source seems
>>> like a workable solution.
>> Option 1 seems complex, and you really don't want to be twiddling parport 
>> bits on every LinuxCNC startup, who knows what is connected to those bits.
> Well, the driver certainly twiddles some bits as it scans 
> the bus to see what PPMC devices are out there.  If you 
> don't have one of the Pico Systems boards attached, you'd 
> have no reason to invoke the ppmc driver.  I'm not 
> contemplating touching the generic parport driver, only 
> hal_ppmc.
>> I prefer option 2.  If there are tweaks needed to help the driver adapt to 
>> the hardware, the logical thing to do is to tell the driver about those 
>> tweaks at load time.
> Yes, this may actually be easier, as it doesn't require 
> major mucking around in the Makefiles to produce two 
> versions of hal_ppmc.  I'm now leaning more toward this.  I 
> think I will make the default setting to be the "new way", 
> so existing configs won't have to be changed to use it.
>> I'm not a big fan of option 3, but I suppose it works.  But imagine if you 
>> later find another idiosyncrasy that requires the driver to do some other 
>> thing differently?  Do you make "hal_ppmc", and "hal_ppmc_old" and 
>> "hal_ppmc_not_so_old"?
>>
>> Better to have command line args with meaningful names like "change_dir=1" 
>> for the old behavior, and "change_dir=0" for the new behavior.  The default 
>> should be the old behavior, and the manual page should say to try the 
>> alternate if the default doesn't work.
> OK, I'll think about your parameter name, and unless I come 
> up with a better one, that will be it.
> No, I don't want the default to be the old behavior, as that 
> has been PROVEN to break on at least a couple parport 
> chips.  I am not, at present, able to find any parport chip 
> that fails with the new method.  (Still digging in boxes for 
> some older PCI cards to try.)
> 
> 
> Thanks much, John!
> 
> Jon
> 
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