The low level serial and IrDA functions are modified to:
- Use the libdivecomputer namespace prefix.
- Return a more detailed status code instead of the zero on success and
negative on error return value. This will allow to return more
fine-grained error codes.
- The read and write functions have an additional output parameter to
return the actual number of bytes transferred. Since these functions
are not atomic, some data might still be transferred successfully if
an error occurs.
The dive computer backends are updated to use the new 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.
Instead of freeing the object data structure in the backend specific
cleanup function, the memory is now freed automatically in the base
class function. This reduces the amount of boilerplate code in the
backends. Backends that don't allocate any additional resources, do no
longer require a cleanup function at all.
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.
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.
We received a report of a Darwin Air device which has a very high error
rate. The majority of the echo packets is incorrect, but since this
doesn't seem to have any effect on the actual data packet, we can just
ignore this error. If there happens to be a more serious error, it will
be detect in the data packet.
Sometimes there were also a some garbage bytes received at startup.
Adding a small delay seems to fix this.
When trying to send the commands as fast as possible, without any delay,
the failure rate is very high. Almost every single packet fails with a
timeout at first. Retrying the packet works, but those many timeouts
make the download extremely slow. Adding a small delay avoids the much
more expensive timeout and speeds up the transfer significantly.
