Re: GSoC project - Synchronization with Mobile Devices

[John Stowers <john stowers gmail com>]

>
> I opted to only concern myself with phones that are paired. That way
> probing is really cheap because it doesnt involve firing up the
> bluetooth radio, lol. I'm also talking to hadess about extending the
> pairing wizard so that you can click 'Sync my contacts' and 'Sync my
> calendar' while pairing your device.
>
> I think there might be some plan to have HAL like data about bluetooth
> devices, too.

I agree. I think the *right way* to do this would be similar to how it works 
with SynCE - a HAL callout adds additional information about a device sync
capabilities.

*However* I would get something going first, even if the information about
phone capabilities is pulled from the comprehensive online gammu database [1].

Once that works we can think about generalising it to the HAL level. 
HAL might have disappeared by then anyway

John

[1] http://cihar.com/gammu/phonedb/




>
>
> > * There is code for getting contact and calendar data from phones using
> > Gammu. It was always quite messy to know if a given phone supports notes,
> > contact, calendar, todo, or all of the above. You will need to discover some
> > way to find this about each connected phone.
> > * It was also hard to know ahead of time, what fields in a contact/calendar
> > that a given phone supports. Name/Email/Phone number, more, less?. I think
> > that for each phone, a test contact will need to be stored, and read back,
> > in order to know the level of support. Conduit core also needs to be
> > extended to deal with sycing with dataproviders that store less than the
> > full amount of data.
> >
> > I will talk more about the last point in another email.
> >
> >>
> >> For now I'm trying to gain better insight into the whole
> >> Linux-Mobile-Synchronization world. I'm planing to start coding in the
> >> beginning of June, by that time, I would like to iterate to a more
> >> exact plan about what has to/can be done, and I'd appreciate your
> >> advices also on the parts not directly related to Conduit. Right now,
> >> I'm preparing for my exams, so I don't have much spare time, but I'll
> >> definitely join you on IRC :)
> >
> > I look forward to working with you. Please email the mailing list if you
> > have any furthur questions.
> >
> > John
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> Peter
> >>
> >> http://blog.lastbeat.org/peter/
>
> Thought i'd update you on a few things i picked up on in your blog post.
>
> The opensync code in Conduit was turned off and removed. OpenSync is
> still a moving target and they broke python support at some point too.
> There hasnt been a stable release for quite some time. While opensync
> support is welcome and would have brought some interesting features,
> until 0.40 is release it mostly just brings bugs and crashing. And as
> distros are advised not to ship the 0.3x series, its not like having
> it in a Conduit release does us any good. So for point 4 of your plan,
> i would advise you to concentrate on the native SynCE support in
> Conduit.
>
> For point 5 you mention Google Calendar support. We already have that,
> though its turned off because it lacks a maintainer. There are some
> patches to re-enable it in my google-calendar branch on github
> (github.com/Jc2k/conduit).
>
> Hope this helps, and look forward to working with you.
>
> John (Jc2k)