From:	 "David A. Desrosiers" <hacker@gnu-designs.com>
To:	 "Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel@graphics-muse.org>
Subject: Re: need summary of pilot-link status for LWN.net
Date:	 Thu, 7 Jun 2001 13:21:43 -0700 (PDT)


We've done a ton of work to get these devices supported under linux,
and remember, we do this *ENTIRELY* in our spare time. None of us are paid to
develop or support Palm in any way, nor does Palm help us at all in this quest
(and actually, they're intentionally making it harder for us to support them
by purposely breaking compatibility). A lot of good code has been put into the
new codebase, and when 0.9.5 is released, it will be a revolutionary change
from the 0.9.3 release (the last "official" release of pilot-link).

As we move to 0.9.6, there are also a ton of new changes that have to
be made, and will change the architecture of the application a bit. You can
see my original post to the pilot-unix list here from back in December:

http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/pipermail/pilot-unix/2000-December/003241.html

It should give you some ideas as to the direction of the application.

And Gordon Heydon's interesting ideas here:

http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/pipermail/pilot-unix/2001-June/004052.html

From November, my conduit ideas to begin after we release 0.9.5 here:

http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/pipermail/pilot-unix/2000-November/003093.html

I also keep a somewhat-daily diary on Advogato, you can find that
here:

http://www.advogato.org/person/hacker/

In it, I detail some of the strife we've endured while trying to walk
this path to developing a proper conduit API and protocol set for these
devices. Sometimes I get a bit personal with my diary, talking about my life,
but you can see how hard it is sometimes dealing with Palm and Palm's
affiliates. You can see an example of that starting here:

http://www.advogato.org/person/hacker/diary.html?start=45

Interesting times.

You may want to check out the ChangeLog also, if you're curious, to
see how much work has gone into pilot-link since I assumed maintainership of
the codebase:

http://cvs.gnu-designs.com/cgi-bin/vcvs/viewcvs.cgi/ChangeLog?rev=1.102&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup&cvsroot=pilot-link

A lot of patches have been tested and integrated, hundreds of changes
and fixes have been implemented. This is truly a monumental release.

It would also be good to mention the pilot-unix mailing list for those
who wish to follow the development, ask technical support questions, or simply
contribute to the project itself. The pilot-unix mailing list is
most-certainly *NOT* dead, and quite active these days. You can find some of
the activity here:

http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/pipermail/pilot-unix/

The directions to subscribe are here:

http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/mailman/listinfo/pilot-unix

/d