pilot-link fails: replace with coldsync?

[Scott Otterson <scotto u washington edu>]

pilot-link has bugs. Is there a way to make gnome-pilot use coldsync
instead of pilot-link?

HISTORY: My PalmIIIx won't synch reliably with gnome-pilot, even though
it works fine when I boot my computer to Win98.  This is because
gnome-pilot relies on the pilot-link package, which cannot handle
certain Linux serial port errors.  I verifed this by manually running
pilot-xfer and also by running coldsync, an alternative pilot synching
program (http://www.ooblick.com/software/coldsync).

The author of coldsync was able to locate and fix the Linux problems but
says that pilot-link is still vulnerable to them (see attached email).

I'd like to use gnome-pilot but pilot-link does not work at all for me. 
Can I make it use coldsync instead?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Coldsync email:
Subject: 
          [coldsync-hackers] Bytes, Bloat & Badness: a new ColdSync
snapshot
     Date: 
          Mon, 27 Nov 2000 10:56:33 -0500 (EST)
     From: 
          Andrew Arensburger <arensb+CShackers ooblick com>
 Reply-To: 
          coldsync-hackers lusars net
       To: 
          ColdSync Hackers <coldsync-hackers lusars net>

        A number of people have complained about the "Bad CRC" errors
that
ColdSync spits out under Linux. So this weekend, I grabbed a bottle of
gin
and a knife, and had a nice long chat with a Linux box. It eventually
confessed.
        It looks as if the Linux serial port driver is flaky, and tends
to
drop bytes at random. 'pilot-link' has this problem, too, but it doesn't
complain because you have to explicitly build it with -DDEBUG for it to
print error messages.
        So I've shored up some parts of the low-level communications
stuff, to make them more robust. Things aren't quite perfect yet, but
they're definitely better than before. I'm considering back-porting
these
changes to the stable (v1.4) branch.

        The new snapshot is at
http://www.ooblick.com/software/coldsync/coldsync-1.5.3-20001127.tar.gz

        This version also refuses to sync an initialized Palm. That is,
it examines the username and userid on the Palm, and aborts if they're
not
set to the correct values.
        The correct values are as follows: if the .coldsyncrc contains a
PDA block, and it contains a "username:" or "userid:" entry, then those
are the correct values. If there is no matching PDA block, or if it
doesn't supply a username or userid, then the correct values are your
name
from /etc/passwd, and your current uid.
        If ColdSync notices a problem, it prints an error message and
even
suggests a pda block to add to .coldsyncrc . I think that's rather cool.

        The downside of all this is that the snapshot distribution has
swollen to 409Kb, and the full distribution to 496Kb. :-( I'm tempted to
take the two libraries (libpconn and libpdb) out of the core
distribution.

-- 
Andrew Arensburger                      This message *does* represent
the
arensb ooblick com                      views of ooblick.com
              ...now, touch these wires to your tongue!