[coldsync-hackers] Bytes, Bloat & Badness: a new ColdSync snapshot

[Andrew Arensburger <arensb+CShackers@ooblick.com>]

	A number of people have complained about the "Bad CRC" errors that
ColdSync spits out under Linux. So this weekend, I grabbed a bottle of gin
and a knife, and had a nice long chat with a Linux box. It eventually
confessed.
	It looks as if the Linux serial port driver is flaky, and tends to
drop bytes at random. 'pilot-link' has this problem, too, but it doesn't
complain because you have to explicitly build it with -DDEBUG for it to
print error messages.
	So I've shored up some parts of the low-level communications
stuff, to make them more robust. Things aren't quite perfect yet, but
they're definitely better than before. I'm considering back-porting these
changes to the stable (v1.4) branch.

	The new snapshot is at
http://www.ooblick.com/software/coldsync/coldsync-1.5.3-20001127.tar.gz

	This version also refuses to sync an initialized Palm. That is,
it examines the username and userid on the Palm, and aborts if they're not
set to the correct values.
	The correct values are as follows: if the .coldsyncrc contains a
PDA block, and it contains a "username:" or "userid:" entry, then those
are the correct values. If there is no matching PDA block, or if it
doesn't supply a username or userid, then the correct values are your name
from /etc/passwd, and your current uid.
	If ColdSync notices a problem, it prints an error message and even
suggests a pda block to add to .coldsyncrc . I think that's rather cool.

	The downside of all this is that the snapshot distribution has
swollen to 409Kb, and the full distribution to 496Kb. :-( I'm tempted to
take the two libraries (libpconn and libpdb) out of the core distribution.

-- 
Andrew Arensburger                      This message *does* represent the
arensb@ooblick.com			views of ooblick.com
	      ...now, touch these wires to your tongue!



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