BIRC or FIRC (was: LIRC guide for FreeBSD)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 15 March 2007 at 19:38:21 +0100, Dieter wrote:
>> but the problem then was that LIRC's "driver" for serial ports was
>> totally Linux-specific, not very clean code, and not easy to port over
>> to FreeBSD. So nobody did make a LIRC serial port driver for FreeBSD .
>
> Last time I looked (a few weeks ago) LIRC wasn't even close to being
> 64 bit clean.

Or anything else clean, for that matter.  It's ugly code.

> And there are reports of LIRC not working even on 32 bit Linux.

In general it does.  But both the code and the documentation are
terrible.

> Isn't there an alternative to LIRC?  If not, perhaps a summer of
> code idea?  (Either fix LIRC or start a new program that works.)

I was thinking of BIRC or FIRC :-)

Apart from the other issues, I don't like the way LIRC works.  lircd
is in charge, and you have to tell it what program to send a keypress
to.  For example, from my lircrc:

begin
        prog   = kradio
        config = eventmap
        repeat = 1
end

begin
        button = playpause
        prog = mplayer
        config = pause
        repeat = 1
end

This means that the eventmap button gets sent to kradio (which I don't
have, so I suppose it will be ignored), and the playpause button gets
sent to mplayer.  If I have more than one mplayer process running,
they all get the button.

What I'd like to see would be a more traditional device model, where
the programs that are interested open the device and read events from
it.  How that would work with multiple mplayers (for example) remains
to be seen, but clearly it's silly to expect the remote control to
know the names of the programs it's talking to.

Any thoughts?

Greg
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