Hi Sylvain,

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 02:27:03PM +0100, Sylvain Munaut wrote:

...

The question is now whether you want this in the same repository or a separate one. The two code-bases share nothing in tems of their implementation. They are completely separate. So it would just be convenience feature for the user not to have to check out two repositories. I'm not quite sure whether to create a new repo or to have it in pySim-prog. Do you (Sylvain, but also generally people on the list) have any preference?

I don't really mind either way.

ok, thanks for your feedback. Given that they don't share anything in common, it might actually be better to use a separate repository after all. This way people are less confused about which part of the code is actually used in case they want to read/understand/improve the code.

It's a bit of a shame that they're completely separate TBH since some of the functionality is duplicated (if you look at Card and Simcard classes, those have close equivalen in the pySim code). Would have been better if the helper classes of pySim had been extended to support this IMHO (like different CLA and things like that).

Well, I agree it is a shame, but to be honest I have struggled quite a lot with trying to use pySim provided base classes in the past and found it extremely difficult to use. One issue is the many different type convesions between binary / ascii-hex. Whenever I wanted to call some function, I was calling it with the wrong type, as they all seem to have different assumptions. It might just be me (I'm not a python guy!) but it took me many cycles of trial+error when I wrote the last set of patches for it.

The other 'problem' is that due to the many different supported cards (and probably noone still having all of them available for testing) it is virtually impossible to touch the code without cretaing regressions. For the past few years we either have code that works for sysmoUSIM-SJS1, or code for older cards, but not for both (due to some assumption about the FCI/SW see 8c1b33c439fef423c3536e9243035722c52aba4c with nobody finding sufficient time and/or interest to resolve it and test it on all cards.

So given that history, I asked Philipp to do something separate to avoid falling into those traps again. Yes, reinventing the wheel sucks, but then, we're not talking about months of work here..

The advantage of pySIm-prog is that it supports serial card readers just as well as PC/SC readers. However, the serial readers seem to have very little significance these days, so in new software I wouldn't bother anymore to support them.