State of the Pilot

[JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>]

There have recently been several mails about what's happening with
gnome-pilot development lately.  Basically as Dave Malcolm noted, its a
time issue for me, althought I'm attempting to do better.

Several people have asked about the bonobo daemon branch, its a major
overhaul I started months and months ago.  

It accomplishes several technical things:

1. Removes GOB usage
2. Switches to gconf from gnome-config, and no longer requires the
daemon to catch a signal it order to know to re-load config
3. Cleans up the architecture, each sync type (usb/serial/irda) is a
class that implments the virtual class gnome-pilot-device
4. Uses bonobo object instead of dealing with all the corba cruft itself
5. Do gnome-pilot-client notifications via bonobo-listener/event-source
6. Simplifies conduit creation in some cases
7. Improved logging/error messaging
8. Probably some other stuff I've now forgotten

As well as several usuability things:
1. Makes it easier for users by allowing the user to create a new
"profile" during a sync.  ie the user can just put in a device press
hotsync and set up the device without pre-configuring it
2. Simplifies the cradle setup (more windows like - you just check off
"serial" or "usb" or whatever and enter the port - hal/dbus can
hopefully can the usb port bit)

Its missing porting of conduits other than file/backup and some polish.
Ideally I'd like new development to take place here.

So for 2.0.x:

I started going through patches in bugzilla this past weekend.  There
are also patches on the list that need review.  Regardless of how far I
get, I'll probably do a release in time for GNOME 2.10.1.

I'm aware of the HAL patches and i did briefly look at one a couple of
months ago and I remember being unsatisfied, but I don't remember being
why, so clearly I need to look again and give feedback.  It also looks
like for several of the OS5 devices we are going to have to move to
pilot-link 0.12.  I need to go back and look at DM's and Dave
Desrosier's patches for this.

Some things I'd like some help with:
1. Mark old 0.1.xx bugs as obsolete (except for feature requests)
2. Review all other bugs for duplicates
3. Debugging evolution pilot related issues - people with source
installs of evolution and gnome-pilot preferrably with repeatable issues
who can use gdb and possibly valgrind.
4. Testing of p-l 0.12 patches with OS5 devices that have issues
currently (I believe a lot of these revolve around backing up files).

-JP
-- 
JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>
Novell, Inc.