From: dick.wall at nospam.bigfoot.com (Richard Wall)
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 17:09:12 GMT
Subject: Cross platform serial library?
References: <927031287.495012173@client1.news.psi.net><14145.26380.455559.698878@amarok.cnri.reston.va.us><199905211336.IAA04855@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <14149.26778.52076.845079@amarok.cnri.reston.va.us> <7i4t0o$422$1@m2.c2.telstra-mm.net.au>
Message-ID: <927652151.614401606@client1.news.psi.net>
Content-Length: 1867
X-UID: 1773                                                

On Fri, 21 May 1999, Mark Hammond wrote:
>Andrew M. Kuchling wrote in message
><14149.26778.52076.845079 at amarok.cnri.reston.va.us>...
>> I don't think a cross-platform C library is required; at least
>>on Unix, most of the pieces are already implementable in a scripting
>>language, because all you need is access to open(2), read(2), and

This is my original point I think. The unix does it fine and hence I have never
bothered before, but I happen to have a non-unix machine which would be ideal
for this application sitting unused, and with no real standard way to use the
serial port (how is it done on MacOS anyway?). It would also be very painful to
develop on this machine, I would ideally like to develop the app on linux and
just run it on the old mac later. This is why the cross platform library would
be very useful.

>
>Indeed.  One of the problems I see with this is asynchronous serial IO.
>read/write etc is fine, but for many applications, a notification based
>scheme is required.
>
>Therefore, I would think a cross-platform serial module should not attempt
>any languages other than Python, and that we use Python concepts - eg,
>threading.Lock() interface to notify a thread a character is available etc.
>
>Mark.

It does sound like there is no such thing as a cross platform serial library
for python at present. Someone sent me a framework for using one under win32 and
the API looked pretty good so maybe this would be a good starting point. I will
look at it some more. Seem like it might be an interesting project, I just did
not want to re-invent the wheel. Anyone got any input (if none I shall take the
current API sent to me and see what I can do with that).

If anyone else wants to get involved, drop me an email. My real address is:

dick.wall at bigfoot.com

the nospam is in the auto-reply for obvious reasons.

Cheers

Dick




