[maemo-developers] GUI Flasher

[From: pancake]

On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:20:15 +0100
Florian Boor <florian.boor at kernelconcepts.de> wrote:

> Looks really good apart from the "misuse" of some stock icons :)

Hehe I would like to

>  > My main idea is to keep the frontend independent to the flasher, so, being
> able to
> > use the same frontend for flashing a Neo1973 or an HTC phone (both flasher sources
> > are available).
> 
> That's a very good idea - the best would be to have a kind of plugin API that
> makes is easier to add support for additional custom flashers.

Yes. Writing a dbus-plugin interface we will be able to use a single
"flashing daemon" for all the devices. So updating and backuping devices will
be easier and cleaner.

Good for users and developers :)

> > Do you think D-Bus is better solution for async communication between process of
> > different user levels? I'm not very familiar to dbus yet. But I can change the IPC
> > interface easily. 
> 
> Yes I think so. It should be quite easy to use with Vala and would be a good
> choice to do the communication between GUI and a privileged background process.
> This is a short example how to use DBus with Vala here:
> http://live.gnome.org/Vala/DBusSample

Yup I know it, but the problem of dbus and vala actually is that you can only create
dbus clients with it. You cannot publish services/methods to the world. The dbus
language integration requires some bit of syntax magic that it is not yet implemented
in Vala.

I have written a working proof-of-concept dbus-server in C, but trying to implement
the required VAPI for it is quite hard and ugly. So I'll wait until Vala have full/decent
support for DBus

I can write the client dbus stuff in the gui, and the dbus-server in C inside 0xFFFF. :)
 
> > I understand that a GUI for flashing should be as cleaner and simpler as possible, trying
> > to avoid stupid confusions to the user and avoiding errors, so, I'm opened to
> > proposals, ideas, etc..
> 
> Yes I share this opinion: The GUI should stay as simple as possible. Dealing
> with multiple different devices/flashers makes things more complicated but you
> can hide a lot of this with a clever application. Automatic detection of
> available target devices would be one thing, another might be to save the
> configuration/file selection for a specific device type automatically. Some
> simple checks if the selected files are valid for the assigned device and
> partition would rock. Another nice improvement would be adding support for
> automatic backups before writing to a device.

Yes, this is a really nice idea. Using dbus we can design a communicating stream
where a "device discover" daemon sends messages and the proper plugins or device
specific flasher can hook to it.

I think that only Free flashers will be integrated with this design.

Maybe if Nokia (any day) publishes a flasher tool for updating their
phones on Linux boxes they will use a privative tool with specific UI for it.

Feel free to join the mailing list to continue the discussion :)

--pancake