[arch-general] The future of bluetooth in ArchLinux

[Damjan Georgievski]

As you might now, the bluetooth packages in Arch are not activelly
maintained so the main developers were looking for help.
I've expressed my readiness to help in any way I can, but I'd also
like suggestions and help from other people here.

So, I've created a git repository for bluetooth related PKGBUILDs
http://damjan.softver.org.mk:8080/git/arch-bluetooth.git you can
browse that repo to see the files there. The PKGBUILDs need a bit of
updateing with the dependancies and descriptions IMHO.

The dependencies are:
* bluez is the base package it depends on dbus-core and glib
* openobex
* bluez-obexd is a a dbus service that implements obex push server and
client and also ObexFTP afaik.. as a dbus service it can't be used on
its own, but is used by some other application which brings us to...
* bluez-gnome is a gnome applet, and some other gnome tools that with
the help of obexd imlement all the interesting stuff you can do with
bluetooth (pairing, sending files (object push), browseing for
devices)

All of the above programs and libraries are maintained by the Bluez
project (www.bluez.org).
Some additional packages are bluez-hcidump used for debuging (depends
on bluez) and bluez-firmware needed for same rare devices (and really
doesn't depend on anything).

Next what I have there are python-pybluez and python-lightblue
(depends on the publuez and openobex) which are two python libraries
for working with bluetooth.. the second offering some higher level
functionality.

Finally there's kdebluetooth which although compiles fine with
bluez-4.21 I don't think it actually works?


The help I'd like would be: to define a TODO for bluetooth, helping
with finding some patches that might be needed and any testing would
be helpfull. I currently don't use Gnome or even KDE4 much (I use some
KDE4 apps in awesome).

I also can't build x86_64 yet.

-- 
damjan