[Xastir] GNIS Labels ?

[Curt Mills]

On Sun, 2 Jan 2005, Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> On Sat, 1 Jan 2005, William McKeehan wrote:
> 
> > I would love to see the code split to allow multiple clients. The perl
> > "client" that I recently wrote
> > (http://mckeehan.homeip.net/amateurradio/APRS/aprstracker.htm) has to
> > create/decode all of the packets individually; this would have been much
> > easier if Xastir had a core that the clients could talk to - especially if
> > that core had a perl object interface associated with it.
> 
> well, i suppose you'd shoot me if i suggested a localhost tcp or unix domain
> socket clients could use for this. actually, i shouldn't, because i don't know
> how hard it would be to add one in the critical path for this code
> 
> if doable, could be done now.

You're perhaps talking about a socket just into the Xastir innards
here, instead of the whole distributed Xastir project.  Something
like that could certainly be done.  Probably taking the x_spider
code and having another level of authentication in there might work,
where a client that had the proper credentials could basically make
queries into the in-memory station database, or perhaps decoded
packet info would flow down the pipe to the client.

Back to the distributed idea though:

You wouldn't want to use Unix domain sockets, as they don't allow
you to later split the code pieces across multiple machines.  TCP
sockets would be the way to go, and what I've been talking about.

I think the right thing to do would be to have one or more
developers concentrate on splitting the current code base up into
multiple pieces, while other developers focus on bug fixing the
current stuff.  We'd want to do the splitting on a CVS branch so
that we wouldn't interrupt the bug-fixing on the main branch.

Once the split code was ready, it could be merged into the main
branch and everybody could try it out.  Later we could start
recoding the various pieces in languages and styles that made more
sense, like object-oriented C++ or Java for example.

Developers:  Does this make sense as a strategy to get there, or is
it better to just start from scratch?  I often take a rather myopic
view of things and try to patch my way to the finished product
instead of cutting loose and starting over.  In this case I have a
pretty good idea how complex the code already is, and starting from
scratch would be a very big task.  My view anyway.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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