mtx_man wrote:DISCLAIMER: I'm biased because I'm the MTX author. I also recognize that many of the ways that mtx is/was designed is NOT optimal and should have been done differently.
I don't think you are, you might be stubborn, but it seems to me you are as self critical as you are critical of others. ie. you'll be honest equally in all directions. I appreciate that a lot.
MTX is designed with 1 primary goal to be USER friendly (not necessarily developer friendly, which is how MT seems to lean). It was also designed to be modular (I failed somewhat in this due to my lack of good programming experience, though it has improved a lot in recent months with ms-2 support working)
I think that is the right approach too because a user might/probably will be incompetent, whereas the dev should be able to figure it out.
That being said, I don't think it's possible to develop something with the relative simplicity of a megatune ini (they aren't THAT simple, but they are terse where they need to be), and maintain the gui flexibility of megatunix which uses glade to do the graphical layout.
That being the key point that I also agree with. This is kinda like our "separate decoders so that they can be optimal in each case" scenario.
For the most part in megatunix adding support for new firmware does NOT require a recompile EXCEPT in the case where the firmware requires unusual or very special handlers. (for example the TTM code in mtx for the tooth/trigger monitor tab), or things like the accel wizard or warmup wizard.
I suspected that, but wasn't sure. How are you feeling now Jean?
Back/restore formats are a hard issue to solve. (lots of ways to go on this one). megatunix is simple export it as an ascii stream of bytes, making it nearly impossible to exchange it across firmwares, megatune's is complex as a xml-ish file which ismarried to the megatune.ini file that was in use at the time of backup. conversion to another firmware release is not guaranteed unless the namespaces are completely consistent (an they tend to be in many cases),
I chose the "you can't translate backup.restores between FW rev's" over megatune's "you can probably, but it might bork some hidden variable burried who know's where" approach.
I hadn't even considered this at all. I'll have a chew over it and post some thoughts.
I actually intended this to be a from the users perspective thread in terms of what you can click/do/how you do it/features/abilities/etc, but this is good too. I might rename this one and start a new one for the other aspect.
Fred.