Hi Todd,

On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 01:29 -0700, Brandt, Todd E wrote:
> One other quick note. The DeviceBuilder software may not be very well
> known to the people on this list as it was developed outside of SSG.
> Lilli Szfranski and Jimmy Huang worked on it prior to their joining
> OTC and Lilli has been suggesting for some time that it could be used
> on moblin. She introduced me to Bryan Roe who helped develop
> DeviceBuilder and is the current maintainer of it (though not actively
> anymore as it has been officially end-of-lifed). I've Cced him in this
> thread as he is the resident expert on its capabilites.

I can't speak to functionality or code quality of DeviceBuilder - I'll
leave that to others. However I am concerned that your suggesting we use
software is potentially unacceptable / unworkable for the wider OSS
community. Please could you explain to me how an outside developer would
work on DeviceBuilder / ilib, for example if they find a bug or missing
feature that needs implementing?

It sounds to me like they'd have to have a copy of windows and a closed
source SDK (DeviceBuilder) - perhaps I'm misunderstanding?

Also could you point us to the ilib svn / git repo, or to its history of
releases, bugzilla etc, and any other open source communities that are
using ilib?

> Ross, can you tell us who from OTC-UK is currently working on GUPnp?
> How long has it been around? What products has it been used in?

AFAIK GUPnP is being used in the next generation of Nokia tablets and is
currently a candidate for inclusion in the next release of GNOME Mobile.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brandt, Todd E
> Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 1:00 AM
> To: Ross Burton; Nagarajan, Guru; Szafranski, Lilli; Huang, Jimmy; Roe, Bryan 
> Y; Moblin Devel
> Cc: Matthew Allum; Jussi Kukkonen
> Subject: DeviceBuilder/Ilib vs GUPnp
> 
> Actually the libupnp software that you're describing is quite old. In point 
> of fact, Intel's former Home Products Group found it inadequate for some of 
> the same reasons you've described. As a solution they created an SDK for upnp 
> called DeviceBuilder which is used to create a upnp stack for any platform or 
> operating system. The output of this tool, ilib, would be the equivalent of 
> GUPnp but with the following benefits:
> 
> 1) Ilib has been tested extensively. It has been around for several years and 
> has been productized on multiple hardware and OS platforms. Coincidentally, 
> the examples of testing you mentioned, the playstation and xbox, have 
> actually already been verified.
> 
> 
> 2) Ilib represents the most up to date software stack for upnp. In fact 
> DeviceBuilder was actually used in the development of the DLNA specification. 
> In theory we could even use DeviceBuilder to create examples for testing 
> GUPnp (which would be redundant of course).
> 
> 3) Ilib is already DLNA certified.
> 
> Unfortunately, the DeviceBuilder SDK itself was never made open source, but 
> the software it produces is. Therefore I would like to second what Lilli 
> Szfranski has been suggesting: that we use DeviceBuilder to create a upnp 
> stack for moblin. To be fair, we should investigate what benefits GUPnp has 
> above ilib and come up with an integration plan.
> 
> Since DeviceBuilder currently has no owner, we could take it over and 
> maintain it from a linux-only, moblin perspective. We wouldn't necessarily 
> have to distribute the DeviceBuilder SDK as part of the moblin development 
> environment. We could just maintain it internally and use it to generate 
> variants of the ilib stack for each of our MID platforms: netbook, etc.
> 
> There are only two issues that I can see that we would need to iron out if we 
> are to use DeviceBuilder and ilib:
> 
> 1) The DeviceBuilder SDK is windows software. It produces code for any 
> platform, but the tool is run only on windows. This is really just an 
> internal issue wrt our development environment.
> 
> 2) The DeviceBuilder's output, ilib, is licensed under the BSD license. We 
> would need to investigate whether moblin ilib could be licensed as GPL; or if 
> BSD and GPL could coesxist.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ross Burton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 3:03 AM
> To: Brandt, Todd E
> Cc: Matthew Allum; Jussi Kukkonen
> Subject: Re: GUPnp
> 
> Hi Todd,
> 
> (ccing Matthew and Jussi, who is also looking at DLNA compliance in
> gupnp)
> 
> On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 15:30 -0700, Brandt, Todd E wrote:
> > Hi Ross, I've been told that they're switching me over to work on
> > GUPnp. Unfortunately that's all they've told me. I've looked at the
> > GUPnp site and it looks to be a linux specific version of what Intel
> > has for cross platform (with a windows only GUI):
> > http://www3.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/downloads/upnp/overview/index.htm
> >
> > Can you give me a synopsis of what work needs to be done on GUPnp?
> 
> GUPnP is a cleanroom SSDP/UPnP implementation, based on GObject and as
> such can offer a lot more to the programmer such as auto-marshalling of
> data and autogenerated bindings.  The core premise -- and why we didn't
> use the existing (although seemingly unmaintained?) Intel libupnp -- is
> that libgupnp is trivial to integrate into GLib applications (such as
> GTK+ or Clutter).  It doesn't block or use threads[1], integrates into
> the main loop, the API is based around GObjects with signals and
> properies, and so on.
> 
> Earlier in the year I blogged a few times about what is going on in
> gupnp.
> 
> Probably the simpliest gupnp application:
> http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/gupnp-basics-2008-05-12-12-50
> 
> Magic bindings generation:
> http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/gupnp-binding-2008-05-23-16-40
> 
> One of the most important areas that needs work in GUPnP is
> compatibility with other devices.  There are reference media servers,
> renderers and control points in the GUPnP tree which *should* let you
> communicate with various devices such as the XBox 360 and Playstation 3,
> but these haven't been really tested.  There are several potential
> failure points:
> 
> 1) libgupnp is either incorrectly implementing the specification, or
> implementing the specification too strictly for other devices.  Problems
> like this are getting rarer, but some may exist still with devices we've
> not tested before.  Generally a copy of the specification and an
> ethernet traffic sniffer will be sufficient to debug these
> 
> 2) The media applications need work.  The media server in particular
> only implements a small subset of the specification so its likely that
> (for example) the playstation makes searches we currently don't support,
> or the xbox expects there to be another service running too (actually,
> that is true).
> 
> So, taking a popular device such as a Playstation 3 or XBox 360 and
> testing/fixing the media server so that it can provide content to the
> device would be great.  Alternatively test that the gupnp media renderer
> can play media from the device.  Existing UPnP media servers (such as
> fuppes) can provide hints as to what workarounds are required here, and
> it doubles as a great way of attempting to expense a Playstation. ;)
> 
> If you have any other questions then feel free to email me.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ross
> 
> [1] well, libsoup currently will use threads to do async DNS lookups,
> but libgupnp doesn't do DNS lookups
> --
> Intel Open Source Technology Centre
> http://oss.intel.com/
> 
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