[Mono-dev] [GSoC] Questions about DPAP implementation

[Song Gao]

Hi,

I am an undergraduate in Computer Science. I have experience as the
principal programmer in two C# projects, one of which is supported by
National Science Foundation of China.

I am interested in one of the Mono GSoC projects for F-Spot, aiming to
implement a managed DPAP library, and I wish to apply to GSoC with this
project. I have a few questions here:

1) It seems that DPAP is not an open protocol. I could not find any detailed
document describing it. There's some document about Apple's services' ports
usage, but it's far not sufficient to implement a library which is
completely compatible with iPhoto. Do I need to analyze its network packets
to acquire its details?
2) There's a DPAP library in Perl written by Leon Brocard (
http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Net-DPAP-Client/lib/Net/DPAP/Client.pm). Is
it a good way to derive from it? (Of course the DPAP API in mono should be
designed similar in usage to the DAAP used for banshee.) However it does not
support password-protected shares. Is it because that encrypted data is hard
to analyze? Is encryption included in the plan of this Mono library?
3) I found this in an Apple's mailing list:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/bonjour-dev/2008/Jan/msg00022.html It seems
that it is not allowed to implement DPAP independently from Apple, at least
not allowed for commercial use. However, according to Mono GSoC rule, all of
the code submitted must be contributed under the terms of the Apache 2.0
License, and Apache 2.0 allows commercial use. Is this a conflict?

Thanks in advance!

Warm regards,
Song Gao
--------------------------------------------------
School of Computer Science
China University of Geosciences(Wuhan)
http://songgao.weebly.com/
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