gnome-pilot and pilot-xfer restore don't work

[Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct debian org>]

Greetings,

I'm having trouble restoring a Treo 600 (PalmOS V5.2H) using gnome-pilot
and pilot link in Debian etch (2.0.15-2 and 0.12.1-5 respectively).

First, the Restore... menu item in the gnome-pilot applet menu seems
completely useless.  The ellipsis suggests a follow-on dialog, but there
is none, nor any menu item check, nor any other indication that it has
been selected.  Furthermore, whether I use it or not, it tries to sync
the pilot, unless it has just been blanked, in which case it tries to
restore it, so Restore... has no discernible effect whatsoever.

Second, gnome-pilot always hangs while restoring the device, going up to
100% CPU and sitting there until the Treo times out.  If I move aside
the file which seemed to cause this, it hangs on another file, and so
on.  This behavior is identical to that reported by Krzysztof Porowski
four years ago, and nobody followed up to his questions, nor has this
problem been addressed since.  This is also Debian bug #146346 reported
five years ago next week, and forwarded to this list, but with no
helpful or corrective replies.  gnome-pilot restore is very broken.

So I tried moving gpilotd out of the way, and trying "pilot-xfer
-p /dev/ttyUSB1 -r [directory]", where [directory] was a new directory
with symlinks into the gnome-pilot backup dir except but with symlinks
to directories removed (see my post to this list May 21 of last year).
But because of udev, there was no /dev/ttyUSB1 until I hit sync, and if
I tried to run pilot-xfer after hitting sync, nothing happened.

The only way I can see to restore this device with udev installed is to
use /dev/.static/dev/ttyUSB1 as root.  That worked, but is not a
satisfactory solution for most users.

<rant>See for example:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=desktop_applications&articleId=9013280 page 4: "Finally, I miss syncing my Palm T/X to my work desktop. It looks like it should work; there's an included application just for that purpose, called Gnome Pilot. But it doesn't."  (Though this may be GNOME bug 428829, reported within the last month.)  Expect to see more of this if we don't clean up major long-standing errors like these: Linux just doesn't work with PalmOS devices, despite all of the efforts of the application authors.  And ignoring these bugs for years doesn't help matters.</rant>

So this brings up two questions.  First, is there some way to make
pilot-xfer wait for the creation of a /dev entry, maybe even register
with udev?  Second, why is gpilotd hanging during restore, and how can
we fix it?

I'm happy to help with testing as needed.

Cheers,
-Adam
-- 
GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B  C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6

Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe!
http://www.take6.com/albums/greatesthits.html