Being able to synchronize the dive computer clock with the host system
is a very useful feature. Add the infrastructure to support this feature
through the public api.
Both the allocation and initialization of the object data structure is
now moved to a single function. The corresponding deallocation function
is intended to free objects that have been allocated, but are not fully
initialized yet. The public cleanup function shouldn't be used in such
case, because it may try to release resources that haven't been
initialized yet.
When the close function returns, all resources should be freed,
regardless of whether an error has occured or not. The error code is
purely informative.
However, in order to return the first error code, which is usually the
most interesting one, the current implementation is unnecessary
complicated. If an error occurs, there is no need to exit immediately.
Simply store the error code unless there is already a previous one, and
then continue.
Currently, each backend has it's own function to verify whether the
object vtable pointer is the expected one. All these functions can be
removed in favor of a single isintance function in the base class,
which takes the expected vtable pointer as a parameter.
Functions which are called through the vtable, don't need to verify the
vtable pointer, and those checks are removed.
The term "backend" can be confusing because it can refer to both the
virtual function table and the device/parser backends. The use of the
term "vtable" avoids this.
The version function requires device specific knowledge to use it (at
least the required buffer size), it is already called internally when
necessary, and only a few backends support it. Thus there is no good
reason to keep it in the high-level public api.
I forgot to update the device and parser initialization functions to
store the context pointer into the objects. As a result, the internal
context pointers were always NULL.
The public api is changed to require a context object for all
operations. Because other library objects store the context pointer
internally, only the constructor functions need an explicit context
object as a parameter.
The devinfo and clock event data is now cached internally at the device layer.
This allows the new dc_parser_new() convenience function to retrieve the event
data directly from the device handle, and applications don't have to deal with
the events anymore to create a parser.
Adding the "dc_" namespace prefix (which is of course an abbreviation
for libdivecomputer) should avoid conflicts with other libraries. For
the time being, only the high-level device and parser layers are
changed.
The public header files are moved to a new subdirectory, to separate
the definition of the public interface from the actual implementation.
Using an identical directory layout as the final installation has the
advantage that the example code can be build outside the project tree
without any modifications to the #include statements.
To be able to cancel an operation, an application should register a
callback function that returns a non-zero value whenever the active
operaton should be cancelled. A backend can invoke this callback function
to query the application for a pending cancellation request.
A helper function is added to simplify implementing the devic_dump()
function on top of the device_read() function, and enable progress
events automatically.
Using a resizable memory buffer allows to allocate the right amount of
memory inside the backend, avoiding having to know the required buffer
size in advance.
When necessary, an output parameter is added to provide the size
information. Status codes are strictly reserved for providing status
information only.
For this new api, each device will be implemented as a separate backend
for a common interface. This will make it easier to support multiple
devices in a single application.