Re: Status of the multiple phone support

[procadas]

                      BORBELY Zoltan <address@hidden>                           
                                                  
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 Status of the multiple phone support              
                                                                                
                                                   
                                                                                
                                                   
                      13-11-2003 23:31                                          
                                                   
                      Please respond to "Discussion forum for                   
                                                   
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>Hi,
>
>As someone noticed the multiple phone support item was removed from the
>TODO file. The multiple phone support is almost ready. This mail explains
>what have been done.

We must send some bar-tickets for the team for their efforts ;-).

>If you want to support multiple phones in one process you have to use
>multithreading. The whole architecture and phone drivers are too complex,
>so implementing it without threads should be much harder. Maybe we
>can do it in the future, but eliminating threads usually isn't an
>important requirement.

Funny, I use HylaFAX, an open fax software server, and threads are in their
TODO list, because the code is complex and difficult to mantain, among
other needs that require threads ;-).

> The best arcitecture is to assign a dedicated
>thread for each phone. If there are no user request, the thread can
>issue a keepalive like command (e.g. GN_OP_GetNetworkInfo) to keep
>the link busy. Each thread have to use a different state structure.
>In the 0.4.x -> 0.5.0 transition all global variables was eliminated
>and moved into the state structure, so you can use libgnokii in
>MT application if you won't share this structure.
>If you want to use gnokiirc in your application you can do it. Just
>fill the first parameter of the gn_cfg_phone_load() function. If
>you specify NULL or empty string, it will use the settings in the
>[global] block.  If you specify "foo", it will load the settings
>specified in [global] and [phone_foo] section ([global] section
>treated as a template).

This looks similar to hylafax. An instance (faxgetty) for each modem
initiated in inittab, and the modems has their own file configuration. By
talking about hylafax it's not my intention demerit(?) gnokii team efforts,
I just think that good design are always welcome that's all, and the work
that is being done by the gnokii developers it's a great job.

>I think the multiple phone support is ready, but we have no time to
>test it. There are applications which can benefit from it (e.g. smsd)
>and there are some which cannot (e.g. gnokii or xgnokii). I think
>gnokii and xgnokii can support only one phone at a time, but we
>have to provide some selection mechanism in the future (e.g. a
>command line option or an environment variable).

The command option is good. I'm not familiar with gnokii code but,
specially with the multiple phone code, why not sending the data (sms,
images, etc,etc), based on phone numbers, pass the data to the multiple
phone code and initiate the phone accordingly?
Of course you can still have the choice to select the phone.

Example: here, the operator's numbers began by 91, 93 and 96. If I send SMS
to 963123123, the multiple phone initiate the 96 operator phone and sends
the data.
The phone are always ready, locked (not strictly "locked"), etc,etc. Thus
implies too much changes?

I hope that my thoughts are not dumb ideas, you must apologize my ignorance
about gnokii code.

>Bye,
>Bozo

Cheers.

Pedro