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Decide: device discovery (adb devices equivalent / mDNS scanning) #5
Description
Gap
Real adb (via the adb server) can enumerate all currently-reachable devices (adb devices, adb devices -l, host:track-devices), and modern Android's wireless debugging advertises itself over mDNS (_adb-tls-connect._tcp). droidsock has no discovery mechanism at all - it only connects to a specific host:port the caller already knows (today, sourced from a static references/devices.json).
Open question
Whether to implement a discovery/enumeration API (mDNS browsing, or some other reachable-device scan), or to continue relying entirely on the caller already knowing the host:port.
Decision
Recorded here once settled.
Activity
Shinrai commentedon Sep 2, 2026
Decision: implement, mDNS discovery hand-written on
dgram- no dependencyTwo mechanisms fall under this issue, handled differently:
Classic fixed-port devices (current use case): a subnet/CIDR sweep of raw TCP connect attempts on a configurable port - trivial, needs nothing beyond Node's built-in
netmodule.Modern wireless-debugging devices (mDNS-advertised,
_adb-tls-connect._tcp/_adb-tls-pairing._tcpfrom #3): implemented directly on Node's built-indgrammodule (raw UDP multicast to 224.0.0.251:5353), not via a dependency.multicast-dnswas evaluated and rejected on two independent grounds:multicast-dns@7.2.5was last published 2022-05-16. Its own runtime dependencies are equally stale -dns-packet@5.6.1(2023-08-25) andthunky@1.1.0(2019-10-14). Taking the dependency means four unmaintained packages, not one.dns-packetis a full general-purpose DNS message codec (every common RR type) plus responder/announce logic for running your own mDNS service. droidsock only needs a query-only client - build one PTR question for a known service name, parse PTR/SRV/TXT/A answers out of the response (including DNS name-compression-pointer decoding). That's a small, well-specified slice of what the package provides, bounded and comparable in size to protocol work droidsock has already built from spec.Failing both the maintenance bar and the scope-fit bar rules it out regardless of how well-known it is. The mDNS query/parse logic will be hand-written on top of
dgram, consistent with the rest of droidsock's zero-runtime-dependency posture.Design + implementation deferred until this is picked up in the actual work queue.
cldmv-bot commentedon Sep 3, 2026
Closed in v1.2.0 — resolved by #18.