> This is very much a rough draft, and I haven't tried to do too much at
> this stage. I've linked to other howtos, including David's IR and network
> connection howtos. I think they should probably remain in a separate
> document, but I'd be happy to take on the docbook conversion task (perhaps
> the "Advanced Palm HOWTO"?).
Hey, you forgot to include my PPP HOWTO =)
I'm just catching up on my mail here, after trashing my LAN at home
in the past few days, so I apologize for the latency. A few points, if this
is going to be useful for people going forward:
The new 0.10.x series of pilot-link releases are all cleaned up as
far as options being passed to the conduits. This means every single conduit
that a user would run interactively (install-user, pilot-xfer, dlpsh, etc.)
all now take -p <port> and -h options for defining 'port' and printing out
the Help, standard. This was fairly ad-hoc in the past, and has been cleaned
up here. It also gives us much more flexibility. I noticed in your FAQ that
you referenced something similar to 'pilot-xfer /dev/pilot -b' in some
places, but you forgot the -p in there. Even the 0.9.5 pilot-xfer uses the
-p for port, or omitted it entirely if $PILOTPORT was set.
Also new in the 0.10.1 release is the proper detection of $PILOTPORT
vs. -p <port>, so you may want to include that as well, via setting it in
your environment.
> Let me know what you think of the HOWTO (remembering it's a rough draft,
> but all criticism welcome).
The usefulness of the options may be in flux a bit as things are
still somewhat fluid. A few users on irc have pointed out some things that
we're missing in pilot-addresses (missing fields in the csv), and
pilot-xfer's backup functions (don't quite include what they say they do),
which aren't exactly intuitive, so that may be changing. I would download
and test the 0.10.1 release and get a feel for how things have changed, so
you can see how they interact, operate, etc. It's much more "solid" than the
0.9.5 release and prior releases were.
Also, without dropping a full release ChangeLog here, there's some
other things that have happened in pilot-link during the quiet period. Many
of the conduits may be merged together, and others which are slated to be
deprecated.
money2qif, which was used to export the data from MicroMoney to a
local QIF file, is no longer used. I doubt people still use MicroMoney at
this point. MicroMoney was bought by Landware, Inc. and then shelved, to be
replaced with PocketQuicken, their commercial replacement (if anyone has
PocketQuicken, please email me directly, I need to start a testing period
with a new conduit there). I have emailed their lead developer at Landware
to ask if we should continue to support this app or not. I have also talked
with the gnucash developers about having a means to go from Quicken (on
Win32 desktop) to PocketQuicken (on Palm) to QIF (via pilot-link conduit) to
gnucash (via import of QIF). Everyone seems to think this is a worthwhile
pursuit.
Applications such as 'addresses' and 'pilot-addresses' are slowly
being merged into one application. There are others also, like 'todos' and
'install-todos'. I'm still playing with the idea of a multi-call binary
which we can use with options like: 'pilot-install -todos' for example. Not
sure yet if that may go into production releases. Comments are welcome of
course.
Also, if Angus says it's ok and we can agree upon a license, I may
roll his PalmPix conduit into the pilot-link-conduits release. This may be
part of the plans going forward as well, to split the current package into
three smaller parts:
- pilot-link-libs for the libpisock, libpisock++ libraries.
- pilot-link-conduits (or apps or some other descriptive name) to
contain things like PalmPix, dlpsh, pilot-quicken, and others.
- pilot-link-bindings (for the language bindings like Perl,
Python, Java, Tcl, and php)
David Goodenough has taken the time to do a cleanroom rewrite of the
Java bindings, and unfortunately we couldn't get it integrated in time for
the 0.9.5 release, but I'd like to get it in the 0.10.1 release as well.
That should be considered and included in your FAQ as well. There's a lot of
people looking at pilot-link now as OSX gets more popular, and more people
begin using Linux. The Java bindings are a fast way for someone familiar
with Java to build conduits around it.
The Python code that was in 0.9.5 and prior never actually worked,
and in fact would never work with current Python releases. Rob Tillotson has
taken the time to rewrite the Python bindings into a package called
python-libpisock, and I've included those, replacing the previously
non-working bindings in there. Also should be a mention in the FAQ about
that.
Related to that, Pyrite Publisher is something we should be clearly
covering in the FAQ as well, since Rob has done a lot of work in this area
to provide a really robust "engine" for data creation and sync.
I didn't see anything in there about the other open source Palm
tools from a development perspective, such as prc-tools (and the history
thereof, from the 0.5 releases with Michael Sokolov through the 2.0 releases
with John Marshall, on to Palm taking up the development of them (via John)
and so on). Also pilrc, and POSE. There's a lot of good material there, and
all three of those tools are open source as well, and people like myself use
them quite extensively.
This should at least give you a bit to chew on, and get a new
version out. I'm anxious to see how it comes along (and it's one less thing
I have to write myself =)
Keep up the great work! We all appreciate it.
/d
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