[Hamlib-developer] rigctld idea, programmers needed :-)

[Nate B. <n0...@bl...>]

Hi all.

It's painfully obvious to me that given my slow progress on the FT-450 backend 
that my idea for a socket based daemon will probably never get written if 
it's up to me to get it done.  So, here is a rough outline of what I have in 
mind.

Using rigctl as an idea base, it was my intention to write a UDP socket based 
daemon modeled somewhat on cwdaemon.  It seems to me that basing the daemon 
on the rigctl code provides a good starting point to prove the concept.

Communication between the application and rigctld would utilize ASCII strings 
much like the interactive mode of rigctl or, if we think it would work 
better, strings like those used by Kenwood and newer Yaesu rigs.

Developing a rigctld as part of Hamlib utilizes our present extensive backend 
library and frees us from having to maintain SWIG which has its own problems.

As I think of it, rigctld would be entirely different from the existing rpcrig 
code as rpcrig is an RPC wrapper around the C library API which doesn't help 
Perl or other scripting languages.

To get started I was thinking about adding socket interface code and daemon 
code to the rigctl code and then tweaking the command interface as needed.  I 
already had the necessary Makefile.am changes working on a local copy of the 
repository so if someone wants to work on this, I can make the changes in CVS 
so rigctld can become a part of the CVS snapshots for testing.

I think this is something that is needed so we can drop the dependency on 
SWIG.  Looking through the Debian Sid repository, there are no packages that 
depend on the SWIG libraries we distribute.

I hope we can get this project underway quickly.

73, de Nate >>

-- 
 Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB          |  Successfully Microsoft
  Amateur radio exams; ham radio; Linux info @  | free since January 1998.
             http://www.qsl.net/n0nb/           |  "Debian, the choice of
             My Kawasaki KZ-650 SR @            |     a GNU generation!"
        http://www.networksplus.net/n0nb/       |   http://www.debian.org