[Rxtx] Port scanning on Linux

[David A. Mellis]

Switching to enumerating all ports under Linux would be a fine
solution for my (Arduino) use cases.  Are you planning to make this
change in RXTX itself?  (Apologies if you already did and I didn't
notice.)

Otherwise, I think it makes sense to provide a way to specify prefixes
to scan in addition to a way to specify ports to use.  The former is
about using additional ports, the latter (typically) about using fewer
ports.  Doing the latter to achieve the former requires the
application to do its own scan, which seems redundant when RXTX
already has code for it.

David

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 7:01 AM, Trent Jarvi <tjarvi at qbang.org> wrote:
>
> RXTX allows a list of ports to be specified but not in addition to the
> default port enumeration.
>
> http://rxtx.qbang.org/wiki/index.php/Trouble_shooting#How_does_rxtx_detect_ports.3F__Can_I_override_it.3F
>
> I'm not sure that adding more ways to do that is going to help people.  It
> will probably confuse them more than anything.
>
> With wide spread acceptance of udev in common distributinos, it makes sense
> to enumerate all ports now.  The remaining concern is embedded devices that
> may not run udev.  That said, they don't create all device files typically
> and could use the above workaround.
>
> We can put a patch in at rxtx.org if there are no significant objections.
>
> On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, David A. Mellis wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Do you think there's any chance of backporting the inclusion of
>> /dev/ttyACM* into the RXTX on earlier distributions of Debian and
>> Ubuntu?  Of course, if instead you'd prefer to support the Arduino Uno
>> and Mega 2560 by applying Peter's patch as part of the process of
>> packaging Arduino for those distributions, that's fine too.  Either
>> way, let me know if there's anything I can do to help with the
>> process.
>>
>> For the RXTX developers: do you think there's any possibility of
>> allowing the application using RXTX to specify the list of prefixes to
>> scan (in addition to the current ability to specify the specific ports
>> to use)?  Would there be any interest in a patch for this?
>>
>> David
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 7:12 PM, Scott Howard <showard314 at ubuntu.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Peter,
>>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver at mavit.org.uk>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I notice that Debian have patched their version of RXTX so that it scans
>>>> all
>>>> ports listed under "Linux-all-ports" in RXTXCommDriver.java.
>>>
>>> The version of rxtx that will be officially released in the upcoming
>>> Debian release will still only scan a limited number of ports.
>>> However, there is an experimental version rxtx which scans all ports.
>>> Ubuntu "Natty" is also testing the version that scans Linux-all-ports,
>>> but the "Maverick" release only scanned a limited number of ports.
>>>
>>> I'm using the experimental version that scans all ports, and I have
>>> not seen a decrease in speed. I've been encouraging users to try the
>>> experimental packages, and I have not heard of any speed decrease from
>>> them so far. My plan is to continue testing and release the
>>> experimental version in "Natty" (April, 2011) and "Squeeze+1" (2012?).
>>>
>>> An interesting statistic: 55% of the users of the debian rxtx package
>>> installed it because they are using the arduino platform. That number
>>> is increasing pretty rapidly.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Scott
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