Adding features from osmocom-bb to libosmocore

[Sylvain Munaut]

Hi Piotr,


> Recently we've added libosmocore as a dependency in order to use it's
> implementation of ciphering algorithms.

Nice :)


> I would like to use more of the code that was already implemented thanks
> to your work, but I've found some parts that I would expect to be in
> libosmocore are not in there but in osmocom-bb. One of the examples is
> interpretation of system information messages that is in
> src/host/layer23/src/common/sysinfo.c.

Usually we only move things to libosmocore when the case effectively
happens that we want to re-use it somewhere else. Since so far we
never needed the "MS" side of those any where else, they remained in
osmocom-bb.


> Is it possible to move parts that are usable for projects outside of
> osmocom into libsomocore? If yes - how can I proceed with that? I'm
> aware that it is not simple process as it involves also removing these
> parts from osmocom-bb and maybe also editing them in order to make them
> independent of osmocom-bb.

Yes it's possible to move parts. We've done it in the past for several
things. (for example the whole SMS stuff was born in osmocom-bb and
moved over to libosmocore when we reused it in OpenBSC).

As you said, it's not a trivial process, but if you go through with it
and sumbmit the patches, we'll review then and comment for merging.
You might want to post them on the OpenBSC mailing list though (which
is the official list for libosmocore) since it's more active and more
people will review them.

You'll indeed need to make sure to make them independent from the
osmocom bb codebase, modify them to be generic if need be.
For libosmocore we also require test suite for any new code, since
there is none in osmocom-bb you'll need to write those for any library
function added.

Once you have the patch to add the functions to libosmocore, you'll
also need to write the patch to convert osmocom-bb to the new API
(which may have been modified to make it generic).


Cheers,

    Sylvain