[Xastir] OpenTrac

[David Ranch]

Hello Tom,

Thanks for working on this.  To be honest, I've never even heard of 
OpenTrac protocol before and I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable on 
APRS.  Guess not!   Anyway, as I've learned from the hobby, the APRS 
protocol is very capable but also buried in a huge amount of legacy 
"debt".  It's shift away from RELAY, it's multiple addendum and what not 
really make it difficult to implement a clean solution.  I don't know 
why OpenTrac didn't catch on but maybe embedded solutions can't support 
both protocols simultaneously on the same frequency?  Maybe there isn't 
enough real benefit over APRS to deploy it more widely?  It also doesn't 
help that TNC vendors like Kantronics, Timewave, etc. have essentially 
abandoned their firmware work.

If something modern like say Direwolf added Opentrac support, would that 
help?  I see that YACC supports it already as well.

--David
KI6ZHD


On 04/07/2019 02:01 PM, Tom Russo wrote:
> So, I have been going through Xastir very slowly trying to clean up the many,
> many warnings that are emitted by modern compilers.  GCC 8 is especially noisy,
> and warns about many things that are not in fact errors in Xastir, but it is
> also finding a bunch of potential problems that need cleaning up.
>
> A bunch of these potential problems are showing up in the various functions
> to handle OpenTrac protocol packets.  Some of these are potential buffer
> overruns, others are just noise.
>
> I discussed with Curt how to clean these up, and we could do one of two things:
>     - work hard to work out exactly how to fix things so the code actually works
>     OR
>     - just remove OpenTrac support, since it's basically dead
>
> The latter is probably the right thing to do, as there are probably very few
> people out there who even remember what OpenTrac was, and even fewer who still
> use it.  It was meant to be a more carefully designed protocol than APRS
> (which grew more-or-less organically, and randomly), but never really
> caught on.  I do not believe there are any currently-available trackers or
> software that supports transmitting it.
>
> So, is anyone at all using the OpenTrac decoding in Xastir, and would they
> be upset if it were removed?
>