Re: [GSoC] Impress Remote and Bonjour

Hi All,

Siqi, the current implementation works fine with Android and commenting things or removing them is 
actually breaking existing clients. It would be great if you’ll do all protocol-related changes via 
Gerrit and always CC me and Michael. These changes shouldn’t be silent because there are thousands 
of active Android users using remote client. If you have any questions about the Android 
implementation — poke me and I’ll give you my opinion, it is highly welcome. The second thing is 
about the protocol itself — it would be great if you‘ll write down all known bugs and desired 
features to the wiki page so I can fix them or implement them. It is great that you post things to 
the mailing list but I just can forget to read some thread and then bug or feature will be missed, 
that’s why there is a wiki page for that (and Bugzilla as well). I hope that my words are 
reasonable and I’m sorry if they sound harsh — I didn’t mean that.

Andrzej, can you post the timeout bug to Bugzilla and CC me? I’ll try to test it on the NG version. 
Thanks for mentioning firewall issues — I saw a related comment at the Google Play page, I’m adding 
it to my TODO list.

And let me be the most pessimistic guy in the room about Zeroconf — it becomes a tradition, huh ;-)
Well, the Zeroconf conception is great. It worked perfectly since the first versions of OS X and it 
always was an example for me about how things should work in real world for people who doesn’t know 
what IP addresses are and what to do to connect to computers and share files. You don’t need that — 
just patch a cable or connect to WiFi and you are already set. So I’m not against it at all.
The point is that world is not ideal. I don’t really know how to make Bonjour work on Windows but I 
think it is tricky at least. What I know is Avahi sometimes is not installed on Linux stations — 
and if it is that doesn’t mean Avahi actually work because it just could be not active as a daemon. 
I’m not sure that an additional dependency for just discovering via remote clients for a very small 
(I think so and have no statistics) percentage of users is a great idea as well.
The network service discovery support is available only starting Android 4.1 [1] which is not 
acceptable because there are a lot of users using older Android versions [2]. There is an external 
library [3] but is seems not updated for a while. Also I don’t know is it a great idea to put an 
external dependency for the client — we had a talk with Michael about that already ;-)
Does that make sense?

Regards,
Artur.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/nsd/package-summary.html
[2]: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
[3]: http://jmdns.sourceforge.net/