Monday 7 November 2011

ObexFTP in GNOME, (non-)update

If you've tried to use ObexFTP browsing (browsing files on mobile phones over Bluetooth) in GNOME in recent times, and didn't get a good experience from it (crashes, or very unreliable browsing), those problems are known, and due to the architecture used to implement the functionality.

If you want to help make ObexFTP browsing good again, please try to convince one of your coder friends to help port the existing code to use the "gobex" library that the obexd D-Bus service uses.

Unless somebody steps up in the GNOME 3.4 timeframe, I will disable the access to the functionality in gnome-bluetooth. The brokenness makes us look very bad, and the files are still available through other (cabled) means in most cases.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If cabling is a reasonable alternaative why not just remove by altogether? Having a Bluetooth manager that can't connect to phones really doesn't make gnome look much better.

Jussi Kukkonen said...

Anonymous, Bluetooth is used for quite a lot of other things as well, not just ftp... and something needs to take care of things like device pairing.

Exposing the user to broken features is clearly wrong, letting the user pair their devices is clearly correct.

Anonymous said...

Sorry for necroposting, but.

Could the bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588986 be fixed? Thus, at least some form of duplex file transfer will be available (desktop -> phone and phone -> desktop). Please, at least mention gnome-user-share on the corresponding gnome-control-center page (and, preferably, in bluetooth-wizard). Please, do not only add links in the documentation.

Best regards,
Anonymous