Phones, Syncing and HAL or UDev

[Martin Owens]

Hello Everyone,

It'd time to site down and talk about the kind of information that's
required to do syncing; the kinds of features and what needs to be
done in order to enable them all effectively.

The plan is for all sync enabled devices to identify themselves in
their fdi files as such:

<append key="info.capabilities" type="strlist">sync</append>

But we also need to know what to use to sync with this device:

<merge key="sync.engine" type="string">opensync</merge>
<merge key="sync.plugin" type="string">barry</merge>

This information however is too specific to go into HAL it's self so I
propose to keep these outside packaged up in barry (in this case) and
putting them into 20thirdparty when installed.

We also need to make sure that any devices which identify themselves
as syncing devices can provide a unique id, this is so when two phones
or pda's of the same kind are plugged in, user software (conduit)
doesn't confuse the two. these are shown here for example, they're
going to be merged by a callout python script:

<merge key="sync.serial" type="string">67cf4023</merge>
<merge key="sync.description" type="string">RIM 8100 Series Colour
GPRS Handheld</merge>

It also allows us to keep track of who on the system 'owns' a specific
mobile phone, and deal with passwords where required. Blackberries
have such a password feature, once the blackberry device has a unique
id, and that unique id has been paired up with a user it's a short
step to using that users keyring (using appropriate authorisation)

Weather these extra features appear as an addon or a user daemon I'm
not sure yet so I would appreciate any and all advice on the format
presented here.

Best Regards, Martin Owens