Windows Mobile syncing made easy

So somehow, last night and today, I've more or less dropped everything else and been working on making it really easy to use Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices connected via USB in 2008 Spring. Happily, I'm making a lot of progress.

This was the state of play as of a couple of days ago:

Nothing at all worked because the kernel modules didn't have the necessary code to handle WM5 / 6 devices. If you fixed that, sync-engine wouldn't run as it couldn't create a default config file. If you fixed that, it wouldn't remember any partnerships you created across sync-engine restarts or device reconnections, so you had to keep creating new ones. sync-engine wouldn't run when needed, it had to be run manually. odccm wasn't set up to start by default and was missing some dependencies in its initscript. synce-kpm, the best graphical tool for setting up sync partnerships and installing software on devices, wasn't packaged. there were no metapackages to ease the pain of getting the necessary stuff installed. we had opensync 0.36, which is entirely broken.

and on, and on, there's lots of other things I've fixed.

Now, I've fixed bugs, added a dbus activation script so sync-engine is run when anything tries to activate it, fixed odccm's initscript, packaged synce-kpm and added an autostart file so it runs when you log in, created metapackages, and reverted opensync to 0.22, which works...and lots of other stuff i don't even remember. it's late. Adam Pigg suggested the odccm stuff. Thomas Backlund added the kernel module fixes to kernel-tmb. John Carr suggested the sync-engine dbus activation trick, for which I'm forever grateful.

there's still lots of rough edges to sand off, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. On my own system, with a clean test user, I was able to log in to KDE, plug in my phone, configure a partnership (with kpm), set up a synchronization (with kitchensync), and actually do a successful sync - all without touching a console. Given that the status yesterday was "just don't bother", I consider this pretty good progress. :)

I'm hoping to have this working really smoothly for final release, so you can just install a single metapackage, restart your session, plug in your phone, and set up a sync really easily. I may also get time to look at Blackberry, Nokia and Sony Ericsson sync too (those are the other devices I have on hand).

I like being able to work on really useful stuff like this :)