On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 11:43 +0100, Sebastian Spaeth wrote: <snip> > I caused quite a ruckus in this gnome bug yesterday: > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560315 You didn't cause a ruckus, people that don't actually read the comments did. > Currently the bluez-gnome connection wizard fails invariably for all BT > devices that don't have a keyboard and are not special cased in source code. Mice, tablets, keyboards, headsets, hands-free, phones work. Only GPS devices and mice, and headsets that don't use '0000' as the PIN codes don't work. That's not very many, and I managed to pair every single one of my devices without a problem (and I have quite a lot of them). > In my case this happens: > I select the "setup new device" from the bluetooth-applet. Select > "eGPS-397" which is my BT GPS device. Next, the "connecting" page comes > up with a brief flash of some "type in random PIN" or something. It > dissappears within a fraction of a second without giving me the chance > to interact at all, leading to the page "pairing failed". This makes the > wizard useless for all BT devices that cannot enter PINs and that are > not special cased. We know about that problem. I have a patch in my tree for your particular GPS device, I'm still waiting for you to file a bug with the details spelled out. > Bastien Nocera thinks it would be a bad idea to allow users to enter a > fixed pin (as a second choice to a default random PIN) via dialog and > asked to enter a new bug for each device to add it as another special > case. This is the wrong approach IMHO. Tracking all the devices out > there and their PINs will be a losing battle and bloat the code. With a > GPS device product lifecycle of a year, those devices will be outdated > until the code ships in a Linux distribution. I didn't say it was a bad idea to allow users to enter a fixed PIN, I said it would be a bad idea to replace random PINs altogether with user-provided PINs. > I see 2 solutions and I would like input in what bluez-gnome devs think: > 1) Try to pair with random PIN if that fails try "0000", "1234", "1111". > This would at least cover about 90% of all devices and only special case > the rest. That wouldn't work, a lot of devices will get out of pairing mode after an unsuccesful pairing. > 2) Prepopulate a Random PIN in a field but allow the user to override > that PIN. After all he should know best what PIN to use. That's as bad as making the user enter the PIN themselves. My solution would be to have a button at the bottom of the device selection page called "PIN options" (or similar). The button would popup a dialogue with options: [X] Automatic PIN selection [ ] Force a random PIN number [ ] Use fixed PIN code: [X] '0000' (most headsets, mice and GPS devices) [ ] '1111' [ ] '1234' [ ] Custom: ___________ Wording is obviously up for discussion. The code is probably an afternoon's work for somebody comfortable with GTK+, maybe a bit longer to get Marcel happy with it ;) Cheers -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-bluetooth" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
