Re: [gpsd-dev] 3.11 has shipped; objectives for 3.12

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <address@hidden>:
> 
> > I anticipate shipping 3.12 around the end of the year. The top item on my
> > agenda for it is...
> 
> I'd like to nominate making sure that gpsd and ntpd can communicate cleanly 
> in JSON mode.

That's mainly up to the person writing the new JSON driver in NTP, I
think.  I'll try to be helpful, but if I have to get directly involved
that probably means I didn't document the protocol well enough - which 
should be fixed first.

I'm not sure I understand why the JSON NTP driver is a good idea.  What problem
wuth the SHM interface is it fixing?

>  I think the PPS case works.  I don't think the non-PPS case 
> works yet, at least not as well as via SHM.

What "non-PPS case" are you talking about?

> Is there a way to turn off SKY responses?

Not at present.  I have a design sketch in my head of a filter option
for the WATCH command, but haven't seen any pressing need for it.  It
never occurred to me that anyone would want to use the JSON stream for
time service - I thought the ntpshm interface was good for that, and
really designed the PPS JSON to address a network-tomography project
Dave Taht and I have been thinking about.

> For the wish list:
>   I'd like to see a mode of gpsmon that displays the info from JSON mode.  
> Possibly this would be better in a separate program.

How would this be different from gpsmon monitoring a gpsd instance?

> Try pointing gpsmon at an instance of gpsd that is talking to 2 devices.  If 
> one is in SiRF binary and the other is in NMEA mode, the display switches 
> back and forth between modes.  (When I first saw this, I was thinking of 
> weird timing bugs.  It took a while to notice that it was flipping modes.)

I probably won't try to fix this.  gpsmon is not intended to be a 
general-purpose client; it's a debugging tool.  I have seriously
considered removing the daemon-monitoring mode entirely.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>