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):
| Value | Dec 2006 | Dec 2007 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Code Lines | 90,540 | 101,687 | +12% |
| Comment Lines | 9,204 | 15,336 | +67% |
| Comment Ratio | 9.2% | 13.0% | +30% |
All these changes were made in approximate 1200 commits.
I hope next year will not be worse :-).
