Re: [PATCH obexd 7/7] client-doc: Update documentation of PhonebookAccess interface

On Tue, 2012-08-28 at 10:52 +0300, Luiz Augusto von Dentz wrote:

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Patrick Ohly [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

What about selecting the bits which don't have a named property
associated with them? They are reported by ListFilterFields() and thus
seem to be supported.

ListFilterFields is removed in this case,

I find it useful, please don't remove it.

 anyway setting bits is still
supported but Im not so sure I would keep it since apparently there is
no way to discover what they mean which could be different from stack
to stack.

The user of a specific device would have to know that.

SyncEvolution's "exclude fields" logic is based on the assumption that
requesting everything, including the custom bits, will result in
everything the device supports, just like not specifying any filter at
all.

quoted

Should the API spec really specify the full list? IMHO the documentation
should make it clear that the list is not exhaustive - more fields might
be added in future releases of the PBAP standard and obexd, without
changing the obexd API.

If we can discover what the bits mean then yes, but unfortunately this
is hardcoded in the PBAP spec (see page 30), so we are only defining
the one we know the meaning.

It's okay to only document those, but it should still allow the use of
the other things. Otherwise a user of the API would have to patch obexd
to use the extensions.

quoted

In SyncEvolution, I use ListFilterFields() to a) do sanity checks on
user input and to b) build a list of all fields from which the user can
exclude specific fields. Because the field list is not hard-coded, that
will work for fields which are not defined yet.

As you can see from the spec this is pretty static so adding a round
trip to discover the list sounds wrong to me,

Hard-coding it in SyncEvolution seems equally wrong to me. If the list
changes, then only obexd needs to be updated, not "obexd +
SyncEvolution".

It's only one round-trip per session. As a tradeoff between performance
and being future-proof I think doing the call is worth it.

-- 
Best Regards

Patrick Ohly
Senior Software Engineer

Intel GmbH
Open Source Technology Center               
Pützstr. 5                              Phone: +49-228-2493652
53129 Bonn
Germany