Although the communication protocol of the OSTC3 is nearly identical to
that of the Frog, the different size parameters make it hard to share
the code easily. On top of that, if we ever implement native bluetooth
communication support, we'll need a completely separate backend anyway.
Therefore the Frog backend is simply duplicated, with a few OSTC3
specific changes applied here and there.
The existing ostc parser is upgraded to support the new OSTC3 data
format.
The React Pro White appears to be a newer variant of the React Pro. For
the communication it uses the newer atom2 protocol, but the data format
remains (almost) the same as the older React Pro.
The Petrel (with updated firmware) supports an enhanced communication
protocol, which is more efficient and powerfull than the legacy Predator
compatibility mode. The new protocol uses data compression for faster
transfers and supports the ability to selectively download individual
dives. Last but not least, the new protocol isn't limited to the last
128kB of logbook data, but can access the full logbook capacity (16MB).
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.
This is only a preliminary version. There is certainly some room for
improvement, but the basic functionality is already in place. That
should be sufficient for daily use, and possibles issues can always be
fixed when discovered.
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.