Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Gammu

Next testing version of Gammu was just born. It brings only small amount of fixes, but most users of recent Nokia phones will be pleased that long outstanding bug with SMS decoding has been fixed. Full list of changes:

• Fixed decoding of Nokia messages (bug #527).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users can get packages from experimental.

New Gammu testing version is finally out. This time it took much longer than usual and it contains some important fixes for messages and AT driver. Full list of changes:

• Fix handling of UTF8 charset with some Motorola phones.
• Identify Motorola V635.
• Set again charset in Motorola phones after changing AT mode.
• Automatically enable OBEX for Motorola phones.
• Fix searching of correct Bluetooth channel.
• Improved SMSD error messages.
• Fix SMS listing when phone was in text mode (bug #584).
• Fix compilation when WCONTINUED/WIFCONTINUED is not defined.
• Fixed listing SMS messages from AT phones in text mode (bug #584).
• Added smscgi daemon by "Kamanashis Roy Shuva" kamanashisroy@gmail.com.
• Cache once read messages to avoid reading them again (bug #481).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users can get packages from experimental.

I handle bug reports and email communication as soon as possible, but it does not mean that it may take month or even more to get reply. I'm not working full time on my free software projects, I do it only in my free time. Besides this I have regular job and I also have a real life with another hobbies.

So if you wrote me something, just try to be patient, sending another emails to urge your issue won't help anybody. I will just have more unread mail to process until I get to real work.

This week I finally realized where problem with random crashes in Wammu and python-gammu lies - python-gammu was using two version of C library - mscvrt.dll and mscvr71.dll. First one came from Gammu and second one from Python. Starting with 1.19.0, Gammu is built with mscvr71.dll and random crashes are gone. Any tester did not report problems with Windows binary, so I decided to make it finally an official release.

So after year or more Windows users can finally use up to date Wammu version! Fortunately I can produce this version without even touching Windows. Thanks to tools such as MinGW and Wine, everything from compiling to generating installer can be scripted and done automatically on Linux!

So Windows users can now also download current version from http://wammu.eu/download/, enjoy it.

Good news everyone, new stable Gammu release is out. Since 1.18.92 it brings only few small fixes in build system, but there is quite big list of changes compared to 1.18.0:

• Add option to disable compiled in protection.
• Fixed detection of PostgreSQL.
• Improve debug messages when connecting to phone (bug #508).
• Fixed handling of some charsets in AT engine (bug #525).
• Identify more Nokia phones (thanks to Iván Gabriel).
• Fixed regression with DKU2 cables on Windows (bug #533).
• Better compatibility with iCalendar files (bug #538).
• Do not link with irprops.lib on Windows.
• Various MSVC compilation fixes.
• Improved AT model parsing and added tests.
• Fixed possible crash in reading SMS from AT phones (bug #515).
• Proper fall back to automatic model when user enters wrong one.
• Added identification of several phones.
• Fixed reading of messages from AT phones without ME memory.
• Improve charset detection on Motorola phones (bug #522).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/.

New Gammu testing version is out. This time release period is a bit longer than usual, mostly because my moving back to Prague. 1.18.91 again only fixes some bugs:

• Improve debug messages when connecting to phone (bug #508).
• Fixed handling of some charsets in AT engine (bug #525).
• Identify more Nokia phones (thanks to Iván Gabriel).
• Fixed regression with DKU2 cables on Windows (bug #533).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/.

PS: Debian users can get packages from experimental.

New Gammu testing version is out. This is mostly bug fixing release, especially with lot of tweaks for Windows build and for AT driver. Full list of changes:

• Do not link with irprops.lib on Windows.
• Various MSVC compilation fixes.
• Improved AT model parsing and added tests.
• Fixed possible crash in reading SMS from AT phones (bug #515).
• Proper fall back to automatic model when user enters wrong one.
• Added identification of several phones.
• Fixed reading of messages from AT phones without ME memory.
• Improve charset detection on Motorola phones (bug #522).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/.

PS: Debian users can get packages from experimental.

Good news everyone, first stable Gammu release in this year is out. Since 1.17.92 only few small fixes in SMS decoding and AT engine did happen, but there is quite big list of changes compared to 1.17.0:

• Fixed decoding of an empty SMS.
• Fixed some mistakes in API documentation.
• Fixed compilation under MS Visual C++ Express.
• Various small fixes if AT driver.
• Add simple shell script to generate JAD file from JAR.
• Added support for adding memory entries to 6510.
• Phone features now can be defined in configuration, so there is no need to modify common/gsmphones.c for testing different settings.
• Config file loading behaves more consistent in lookup. In some cases it can now find different configuration file.
• Fixed crash when there are too many messages (bug #466).
• Fixed crash when printing messages on Windows (bug #476).
• Do not ask phone for IMEI so often (bug #480).
• No need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH for tests.
• Properly wait for SMSD child processes (bug #486).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/.

New Gammu testing version is out. This is mostly bug fixing release, but you should be able to do addnew with 6510 driver now. Full list of changes:

• Fixed some mistakes in API documentation.
• Fixed compilation under MS Visual C++ Express.
• Various small fixes if AT driver.
• Add simple shell script to generate JAD file from JAR.
• Added support for adding memory entries to 6510.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/.

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 :-).