DVB driver development, some thoughts

This is no introduction about how to do driver development. Just a short intro showing that you usually don't write one in a single day, and about the progress of the DVB driver.

On windows, we can use Tortoise SVN to manage SVN sourcecode repositories. Especially the history view is convenient, it also allows to select arbitrary versions, to check them out or compare them. Using a good revision control system is always a helpful idea. Whatever you did to your working copy, you can revert it to the last version with a simple command.

The DVB-T driver is still not finished, for example automatic tuning is still missing, but so far it's fairly complete. I made a image of the history of this driver available for those who are curious.

As you can see, I worked on it on 26 days during the last 8 month. A have no accourate number about the hours spend for development, but I'm fairly sure that it was better than spending them watching TV, or surfing in the internet. What are you doing right now?

Assuming a average of 5 hours each day, this means 130 hours kernel driver development. But I'm sure I spend much more time on it, I just didn't always do a SVN checkin. 180 to 200 hours, including the needed research, seems proper to me. This is still not including the time spend on the userspace things, like the demultiplexing and decoding media add-on, or the TV application.

The driver is still not published. I'm not sure if I'll ever publish it. The majority of the BeOS community doesn't want to pay for drivers. But cconsidering all the work spend on it, giving it away for free seems to be a stupid idea.