Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

One year ago, I took over Gammu maintenance. I think it time to summarize a bit what happened during that year. There were definitely good and bad releases in that time (especially strictness introduced to SMS parser in 1.13.0 took quite a lot of releases to fix various bugs), but generally I things Gammu is moving in a good way.

What I would definitely call positive:

• Added build time testing. This helps a lot to catch regressions. However more tests could be done.
• I cleaned up lot of code parts so that Gammu is now more resistant to bad data and should not crash in these cases.
• Added lot of API documentation, most API functions are now fully documented.
• More often testing releases - I try to release every week. Sometimes changes are huge, sometimes just few bugfixes. This makes Gammu occur among most vital projects on freshmeat.net.
• Quite complete IrMC implementation together with AT/OBEX switching gives support for quite a big range of phones today.
• SMSD got PostgreSQL support.
• AT+CMGL support for reading messages gives us support for many phones which were not supported in the past.
• I started to use OpenSuse Build Service and Ubuntu PPA to provide up to date binaries for many distributions.

There are also some bad things:

• Nobody cares about build under MSVC. It is broken sometimes and I try to fix issues, but no constant testing of this causes problems.
• Almost no new features for Nokia phones. I simply lack time to do anything more than bug fixing here.
• Still bad support for Symbian phones. Some developer interested in this area is definitely needed. But probably OpenSync with SyncML is enough for most people.
• The changes I made to the SMS parser broke too much things, I should have payed more attention to this change. But now things seem to be worked out.

Some statistics of last year (based on Ohloh):

All these changes were made in approximate 1200 commits.

I hope next year will not be worse :-).