Oracle Corporation doesn't care of your needs.
Got it ?
Hundred of people said that they are ready to pay for parallel port support.
But sanderv wrote anyway: "unfortunately none of our paying customers have asked for it yet and we are very busy with other things."
Got it ?
Programmers are ready to offer their time to develop parallel port support. But they need adequate documentation.
And the reply of sanderv is: "To keep elaborate developer documentation up-to-date we'd need to invest a lot of time."
Got it ?
Maybe there is an other product that cares of customers needs ?
Got it ?
Bye.
sandervl wrote:
mpack wrote:IMHO, for that suggestion to be practical you need to make it easier. Programmers like me have day jobs and a limited amount of spare time, some of which I may want to spend on other hobbies. If I'm going to work on VBox then it would be nice if the principle of operation was documented, ditto the API used for guest host communications (e.g. the one that allows me to hook I/O addresses and IRQs - I assume that such an API must exist). Sans that, you are expecting each programmer to individually reverse engineer all that stuff before they can get stuck into the meat of the project... and well I for one simply don't have the time.
Sorry, but isn't a practical suggestion (either). APIs change, designs change. To keep elaborate developer documentation up-to-date we'd need to invest a lot of time. Instead we cleanly document code and interfaces in the source code and keep the design very modular. And without trying to praise ourselves too much, the code is extremely clean and professionally designed. You will not see such high coding standards in many other (open-source) projects. This makes it also easier to get started.
The doxygen step in building the project does create documentation for internal interfaces and the SDK contains full docs for the public COM interfaces (which aren't relevant to this case though).
The code I linked to contains a full virtual parallel port device. It was written by an external contributor who didn't need any guidance. In case you're wondering why he didn't finish it; we hired him and assigned other tasks to him.
I agree the learning curve is steep, but that's simply inevitable with a project of this size and complexity. People with questions typically post on the developer's mailinglist where we try to answer each and every one of them.
Despite being quoted by him, I wish to disassociate myself with the comments of the previous author. IMHO if you get something for nothing, then nothing is also what you are entitled to. Anything beyond that is a luxury which you should be grateful for. If you want something and don't get it? Tough - go pay for a better solution, or make your own. Yes it would be nice if LPT support (in Windows) was implemented, it would be nice if third party developer support was practical, as I think both of these would improve VirtualBox. I'm not claiming I'm entitled to either.
I know there's demand for parallel port support, but unfortunately none of our paying customers have asked for it yet and we are very busy with other things. That was true back in the Innotek days, during the years at Sun and remains the same at Oracle
Which amount of money should be paid for that feature? LPT1please can then calculate how many people paying for example 100 Euros are necessary.
Maybe we can find enough people for this fund.
I know there's demand for parallel port support, but unfortunately none of our paying customers have asked for it yet and we are very busy with other things. That was true back in the Innotek days, during the years at Sun and remains the same at Oracle
Which amount of money should be paid for that feature? LPT1please can then calculate how many people paying for example 100 Euros are necessary.
Maybe we can find enough people for this fund.
That might have been feasible back in the Innotek days, but at Oracle such things are quite impossible. Sorry.
Easy solution for some: forget virtualbox, use DOSbox
There is a recent version with many great features,
including support for printing to LPTx ports.
Replace "some" with "a few". DOSbox is an emulator, not a hypervisor, so it'll be far too slow to run modern apps. Also as the name implies it is designed to run DOS only - which has (ahem) little more than novelty appeal for most modern users.