[Bitpim-devel] Some thoughts on phone model checking and the filesystem view

[Stephen Wood]

Roger:

What would you think of adding code to the phone support routines to
require that the attached phone model match the selected phone type? I
think the firmware request packet usually has enough information to tell
if the phone matches the model and carrier selected. getfundamentals
could return an error code in the dictionary it returns. We could have
an undocumented .bitpim parameter that would turn off this checking.
(Since the Sanyo phones are quite similar, it is still useful to be able
to request protocol dumps from users of new Sanyo phones).

A more radical thought I have is to disable the File System view,
unless an undocumented parameter is set. I'm not sure if I would be in
favor of it, but I figure I might as articulate the thought.

Stephen

[Roger Binns]

Your suggestions all depend on what the ultimate goal is.
One I want to do is automatically select the correct phone.
We currently use USB ids, and when I started BitPim I
naively assumed each model would have a different id!
So at some point I would like code that does that side
of detection.

The other goal is to reduce the support load of people
doing things they shouldn't because they can't be
bothered to read the online help etc.

Having some secret magic to turn on filesystem or incompatible
models won't solve that problem since it will either end up
documented and part of the various web sites out there, or
worst case someone will take the code, comment out the relevant
lines and do their own releases just like some nimwit did
for the 0.62 vx6000 special version.

I think the better solution is that the first time the
filesystem view is selected a dialog box appears that
you have to accept that tells you how bad things will
be. I suppose something similar could be done for
lying about the phone.

Let me think about this for a bit.

Roger