Question about Suunto EON Steel on MacOS

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Janice McLaughlin
<janice at moremobilesoftware.com> wrote:
> I was just looking at the Suunto Eon Steel support added and was wondering if anyone had tried it on a Mac.

Sadly, I can't claim to know whether it works or not. I have no MacOS anywhere.

> Specifically:
>
> Since the EON appears to identify as a USB HID device, the oh so wonderful MacOS kernel driver will probably grab it right?

Not necessarily. Since it doesn;'t have any HID descriptors, there's
not a whole lot MacOS can actually do with it - it won't be usable as
a keyboard or joystick or something like that. So what would a MacOS
kernel driver do with it? I have no idea.

So only testing woudl tell, I suspect.

> Which means in suunto_eonsteel_device_open(), the call to libusb_claim_interface(eon->handle, 0) will fail. (Been there, done that). But there is no return code checking on the call so the open will continue. Is that on purpose?

That was on purpose. It's not like checking errors will help. It's
more likely to hurt. So it tries to detach the kernel driver and claim
the interface, but it's one of those "let's do the best we can, and
then just access the device".

There are people who think that you should check every error you can.
I don't partake of that religion: error checking is only useful if you
*care* about the error and there is some reason to do something
different.

I have no idea what MacOS does about those things.

                      Linus

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