On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 04:23:07PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote: > On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 04:12:50PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote: > > Good point. Similarly, there is a difference between actively > > obfuscated "source code" (which isn't the preferred form of > > modification), and poorly written code. The latter, although you may > > prefer to not modify it, is arguably the preferred form of > > modification. > > > > Just because the code doesn't use #defines or enums doesn't > > necessarily make it obfuscated; it may just be that Vojkovich sees > > that as too indirect, and prefers to write outb(0x3241, 0x51) because > > he happens to know the port ID numbers and values off the top of his > > head. > > > > Is it *actively* obfuscated, or just not as clean as you would like? > > If it is actively obfuscated (has been run through a sed script to > > remove whitespace, or similar), then someone needs to ask nv for the > > real source. > > > > Is there someplace we can download the code (call it what you like) > > without also downloading the rest of X11? > > I've just taken a quick (~10min) look through it. It's definitely > readable, and makes sense for the most part as far as I could see. > It's got comments and is fairly cleanly written. The caveat is that > there are a lot of magic numbers scattered about the code. Some are > commented (such as specific chip ID's) and others are not, since > they're things like bitmasks. I quickly looked through the ati > driver code as well, and while it seems to have significantly less > of these, those that are there are nicely commented telling you > where they came from. No such niceties in the nv code. Still, > nothing that would make me call it obfuscated. > > I'll see about taking a closer look at parts to see if it actually > makes sense, but so far it looks fine to me. As it is, I don't see > any difference between this and any other vendor not releasing > hardware specs and yet a Free driver exists. Not a good thing, but > not non-free either. Well put. I think it is arguably not "source code", however, if the source we are seeing is the result of some sed-like script which converts a sort of custom #defined MAGIC_NUMBERs to id numbers, and then removes the #definitions.
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