libsyncml

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 09:54 +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
> On 2009-03-23, 17:44 GMT, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > And for Nokias - you can do limited
> > sync very well with the gnokii plugin, and more sophisticated sync with
> > the libsyncml plugin on some Nokias (some have broken SyncML
> > implementations and just don't work right). The latest version of
> > libsyncml which works with opensync 0.22 is 0.4.6, so we should revert
> > to that.
> 
> Thanks a lot for finally explaining me this whole mess. Two years 
> of my life working in Red Hat were spent trying to make 
> synchroznization to my Nokia 3110 Classic work without any 
> visible results (aside from putting myself on Cc: of 
> http://opensync.org/ticket/877 ;-)) and whole thing makes me 
> really crazy. Oh well.

Yeah, it is something of a mess to figure out. I came at it just because
I had a Windows Mobile phone and I wanted it to do something when I
plugged it in :) So I mostly came at opensync via the synce angle, but
after that, I got some other phones I had lying around to work too (I
had a working sync group which synchronized my contacts on a Windows
Mobile phone, a Nokia 6300, a Blackberry, Evolution and KDE 3 in a
single operation - opensync can actually do some pretty awesome stuff
once you get the damn thing to work).

It looks like you had the same problem with syncml as I did - a Nokia
phone with a bad implementation (my test device, a 6300, has a similar
problem, it just doesn't seem to do SyncML properly no matter what
settings you try). If gnokii supports your phone, then the gnokii
opensync plugin - which is thankfully really easy to configure - will
let you sync contacts and possibly calendar entries, but not tasks.
(gnokii bypasses SyncML entirely and accesses things some other way).

> One of the problems I see with opensync (aside from being totally 
> underpowered upstream and mostly ignored by everybody else than 
> SuSE and as I see now Mandriva, and especially ignored by most
> Fedora folks) is that I don't see any effort at all on their side 
> to maintain stable branch.  Any requests for fixing bugs are 
> stereotypically replied with "Wait until we finish 0.3* (now 
> 0.4*) branch".  I have been waiting for two years. Oh well.

Yeah, that's definitely the big problem, it causes all kinds of issues -
like the KDE 4 thing. No-one wanted to write a plugin for KDE 4 /
akonadi for opensync 0.22 because everyone knows it's 'obsolete', but
no-one really wanted to write one for 0.4 either because it doesn't
work, and even now that one's getting written for 0.3/0.4, it's not much
use to anyone yet :\.

Some fixes for 0.2 do get stuck into the SVN branch, but not very many.

I think there was also a historic problem in that when 0.22 was still
current, there was no really good interface for it (you only had
msynctool the console client, or multisync-gui, which isn't very good).
The KitchenSync from KDE 3 is actually an awesome GUI for opensync 0.22
which makes it really easy to set things up - that's why the Mandriva
instructions are based around it - but it didn't really show up until
quite a bit later, and even then, very few people seem to know about it
for some reason.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net