[Hamlib-stationserver] Philosophy: Abstraction vs Rig Interface Artifacts

[Art B. <ac...@in...>]

Started some very preliminary doodle of the object models, and looking at the rigctld man page it occured to me that a number of the commands are really pass-throughs of legacy UI mechanisms.  

E.g., there are a variety of options for RIT (and XIT), split and repeater shift... all of which are really just ways of making the transmit and receive frequencies different according to various rig interfaces and technology legacies. 

Seems like it might be cleaner to abstract all that out and simply model each receiver and each transmitter as having independent frequency and other settings that might or might not happen to be the same at any point in time.  

Which might require adding some rig-specific shims to order up the required configuration in language each particular rig understands... and of course, familiar mechanisms such as RIT, split or shift could be reproduced in client UIs as folks desire.  But I'm thinking what we're really after is a universal abstraction layer... or at least as universal as we can make it... rather than just passing through every CAT command there might be.

However I suspect this isn't a new dilemma, so I'd appreciate any background or insight anyone can offer.

Thanks!

- Art

Also, I'm not seeing a lot of support for control of various filtering options.  As that's been a competitive feature among rig vendors it may be another area where we have to decide whether to abstract or accept various proprietary styles.