[chirp_users] General inquiry on adding "settings"

[chirp.cordless at xoxy.net]

Before I start, this is less a request to give me something for free,
more an inquiry whether doing part of the job is enough to get
someone else to finish it, and how that might work. I haven't seen
this kind of development meta-discussion, so here goes:

I'm inquiring about adding Chirp control of feature settings as has
been done on a few radios. I can see it's a separate significant project
for each radio, but there's some general infrastructure in place since
it's been done for some, and presumably the first one was the hardest.
Since I'll get asked, my interest is my radios, Yaesu FT-60 & FT-8800.

I'm an old unix C hacker, with a bunch of shell and a healthy exposure
to a number of others, but I retired before OOLs became needed to
use on a regular basis. I can sort of read the Chirp Python source,
but I'm thinking there's too much to learn to contribute code.

I expect that the first step is to map out the settings in the data stream.
For example, the FT-60 seems to have 56 set parameters, most of which
can take from 2 to a half dozen or so values. A few, such as repeater shift
or tone value seem to be multi-bit data fields that one hopes are encoded
binary values that be reverse-engineered with a few samples, and described.

I guess the process would be to change a setting via the radio's buttons,
read into chirp. and record what changed in the data stream. Rinse and
repeat. If someone (me, for example) were to do that and provide the map,
would that likely be enough to have someone else pick it up and code it into Chirp?

And if so, what form should the 'map' take? Several hundred complete
radio images seems less than optimal to me, for several reasons,
most obviously that it still needs interpretation to code from.
I could probably do a Python const data structure or equivalent
if pointed to an example.

Just looking to understand this aspect of the development process.

Thanks and regards,

-dan