[GSoC] Impress Remote and Bonjour

[Siqi Liu]

2013/7/22 Artur Dryomov <artur.dryomov at gmail.com>

> Hi All,
>
> Siqi, the current implementation works fine with Android and commenting
> things or removing them is actually breaking existing clients. It would be
> great if you’ll do all protocol-related changes via Gerrit and always CC me
> and Michael. These changes shouldn’t be silent because there are thousands
> of active Android users using remote client. If you have any questions
> about the Android implementation — poke me and I’ll give you my opinion, it
> is highly welcome. The second thing is about the protocol itself — it would
> be great if you‘ll write down all known bugs and desired features to the
> wiki page so I can fix them or implement them. It is great that you post
> things to the mailing list but I just can forget to read some thread and
> then bug or feature will be missed, that’s why there is a wiki page for
> that (and Bugzilla as well). I hope that my words are reasonable and I’m
> sorry if they sound harsh — I didn’t mean that.
>

Hi Artur, I've already restored the old implementation a couple of days ago
so it should work as before now. Sorry that I've commented that out since
it seemed like it doesn't work on my device. You can pull the master branch
and it should be working with the android app. However, as I said earlier,
the current implementation is still less reliable than the Bonjour/Avahi
service, but if that is too complicated to use on the android then it's
fine to stick to the old implementation, that's up to you.

I will try to remember to put what bugs that I've found on the wiki page so
that you can find them easily. Just didn't have the time to organize them.
Maybe you can create a filter (if you use gmail) which put all mails from
Micheal, Andrzej and me together so that you don't miss them ^^ That's what
I've done, maybe it can comes handy to you as well. There is absolutely no
problem to stay direct with me :-P I mean we are all gsoc students so we
both have a lot to learn. ^^


>
>
Andrzej, can you post the timeout bug to Bugzilla and CC me? I’ll try to
> test it on the NG version. Thanks for mentioning firewall issues — I saw a
> related comment at the Google Play page, I’m adding it to my TODO list.
>
> And let me be the most pessimistic guy in the room about Zeroconf — it
> becomes a tradition, huh ;-)
> Well, the Zeroconf conception is great. It worked perfectly since the
> first versions of OS X and it always was an example for me about how things
> should work in real world for people who doesn’t know what IP addresses are
> and what to do to connect to computers and share files. You don’t need that
> — just patch a cable or connect to WiFi and you are already set. So I’m not
> against it at all.
> The point is that world is not ideal. I don’t really know how to make
> Bonjour work on Windows but I think it is tricky at least. What I know is
> Avahi sometimes is not installed on Linux stations — and if it is that
> doesn’t mean Avahi actually work because it just could be not active as a
> daemon. I’m not sure that an additional dependency for just discovering via
> remote clients for a very small (I think so and have no statistics)
> percentage of users is a great idea as well.
>

Actually Avahi comes with most of the modern Linux distro and Bonjour comes
with Mac OSX. But yes, on Windows it can be tricky but it seems that a lot
of widely used software needs that service as well, so we can probably find
a way to handle that as well. For now, I've implemented the Mac OSX with
bonjour and Avahi on Linux just needs some modifications to be able to
build with some CFLAGS. I'm working on that.


> The network service discovery support is available only starting Android
> 4.1 [1] which is not acceptable because there are a lot of users using
> older Android versions [2]. There is an external library [3] but is seems
> not updated for a while. Also I don’t know is it a great idea to put an
> external dependency for the client — we had a talk with Michael about that
> already ;-)
>

Yep, on Android there is always a problem of fragmentation and maybe at
least you can make it conditional on the android app? If (version>4.1)
Bonjour resolution else ... Otherwise I suppose the IP resolution should be
really easy as it's just several lines of code on iOS.


> Does that make sense?
>
> Regards,
> Artur.
>
> [1]:
> https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/nsd/package-summary.html
> [2]: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
> [3]: http://jmdns.sourceforge.net/
>

Happy coding!

-- 
--------

Cordialement,
Siqi LIU

Étudiant Ingérieur, Université de Technologie de Compiègne
Vice-Président de l'association robotique UTCoupe
Responsable d'atelier de ClubChine

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  Tel. +33 7 61 16 95 83
  email: me at siqi.fr
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