[linux-minidisc] Announcement: libnetmd and new repository

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Dear subscribers of the linux-minidisc mailing list,

I am very pleased to announce that we recently made a big leap forward
in development and have now included NetMD support into our C code.

Previously, NetMD functionality was only available through a number of
Python scripts which worked fine for many people but also required some
background knowledge for proper installation and usage. We have therefore
made the decision to create a C library called "libnetmd" analogous to our
existing library "libhimd" which is used to access HiMD devices so that
we can eventually integrate NetMD functionality into our GUI application
"QHiMDTransfer" (which we will consequently rename to reflect these
changes).

libnetmd was actually not written from scratch, but we adopted the original
project hosted on SourceForget.net [1]. The library was imported into our
code repository and the code has been extended with transfer capabilities.
Most of this work was done by Alexander Sulfrian during the recent
"Google Summer of Code 2011". Since we did not succeed applying for
GSoC ourselves, we asked the people from the VideoLAN project for support
and they were so kind to allow one of their students work for our project. So
without VideoLAN and Google, this work wouldn't have been possible.

For anyone who would like to give the recently updated libnetmd a try, please
check out the source code from our main repository here:

	git clone git://minidisc.dyndns.org/linux-minidisc.git

Note that we have changed the address of the git repository during the last
maintenance to be more consistent with the common standards. Also, we
have completely cloned Alexander's repository and will continue the work
from there, thus you must re-checkout the repository into a new folder or
merge your old local repository with our new master repository.

To be able to build libnetmd and the "netmd" command line utility, the
following libraries will have to be installed including their development
headers:

- libgcrypt
- libusb-0.1* (Note: libusb-1.0.0 is currently unsupported)

The code can be compiled by simply calling "make". Before that works, edit
the Makefile and comment the following out:

	PEDANTIC += -Werror

by putting a #-sign in front of it.


Have fun testing the code! Any feedback is naturally welcome.

Adrian

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/libnetmd/