[chirp_devel] Updates to ICOM IC-Vx Radios

[Dan Smith]

> [kosta] I have tested them against the ICF files, which plainly put is simply a hex dump representation of the binary image..  Currently ICF files are opened as read only, so in theory if we had a mechanism to serialize from image to ICF we could run the tests? 

Okay, I forget if you can open as ICF and then save as .img. Technically you should be able to, but I can't remember if the UI will let you. Either way, if we're going to get someone to test these (and we should) we should just get images from them at the same time.

> [kosta] I can certainly understand the hesitancy, however given that they are clearly marked as experimental could we consider releasing these in hopes that some user may attempt to run them and thus is more likely to provide an image? As it stands with no support for these radios, users are not provided any mechanism in which to generate an image to begin with... By releasing the experimental drivers we increase the likelihood of potentially receiving feedback and/or getting an image from some user - and assuming their expectations are tempered, impact to the community should be low.  This does not alleviate our desire to test on actual hardware, but considering the scarcity of some of these radios it may be  something to think about...

Yeah, to me experimental means "we think this works but probably isn't perfect." It's a far cry from "this has never talked to a real radio" IMHO.

Users can load the .py as a module to test it, so if there are users asking for these in a bug, you should be able to send that to them to let them try it before we commit.

--Dan