Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Gammu

As I wrote before, I tried to use Ubuntu Personal Package Archive for distributing up to date Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages. For first time I failed because I expected it to behave more like OpenSUSE build service than like Debian archives, but I was wrong, so I have to upload different version to each Ubuntu suite.

Well that sounds like a work which should be automated. So I hacked a little shell script, which takes current version from unstable, updates changelog and injects it into my PPA. The hacky script is called deb2ppa. It requires dput to be configured for ppa same way as I have it and maybe has some other tricky dependencies which I do not realize right now.

Anyway you can now use current Wammu/Gammu versions even on older Ubuntu releases if you wish :-). (Well you have to wait till it is rebuild, but I hope it will not take much time.)

When Ubuntu announced public availability of Personal Package Archives, I thought it might be good to use it to provide up to date Gammu related packages. After successful registration I uploaded Gammu package and no reaction so far, so I'll wait.

However this memorised me that I wanted to use OpenSUSE Build Service for same purpose some time ago. I filled in registration and as I didn't receive any email about being accepted, I absolutely forgot about that. Now just tried to log in and it works. So you can now have access to latest Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages for most recent RPM distributions (Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2006, Mandriva 2007, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE Factory, SLES 9 and SLE 10). I could not test them so any feedback is welcome :-). You can find all packages on overview page or directly in download folders.

Playing with spec files after long time was quite painful, but I got to it after I managed the hardest thing - how to make build dependencies which will work on all these distros.

I hope I will be able to announce similar service for Ubuntu users using PPA, but now I have to wait for some reaction on my source uploads.

Here comes new Gammu version - 1.15.0. This time it is really short after 1.14.0, but SMS reading error in that did not give me other choice. Compared to 1.14.90 there is single change:

• Better parse vCard version 3 (bug #434).

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

Fixing bugs in code and committing it to VCS usually also means that you need to interact somehow with BTS you use to let it know that the bug has been fixed. This is manual work which could be done by some clever commit scripts, right? All what is needed is just spend some time to set it up.

Most of my development currently goes to Gammu/Wammu which uses own Mantis bug tracker. It is already a bit prepared for integration with VCS, but I never found their documentation sufficient. Fortunately somebody wrote tutorial on integrating Mantis and Subversion, which made it quite easy to set up. All what was needed was to put little commit hook into SVN.

Now the logical step was to make it also for Debian packages. A bit of Googling revealed discussion on debian-devel. Unfortunately no example for SVN, but ripping out needed things from Manoj's script for Arch was quite easy and I made my own commit hook. While looking at this, I also found wonderful tool called debcommit, which commits changes to Debian package using changelog entries as commit message. I still wonder how many useful tools are hidden to me.

The only thing I don't know is why Google didn't show me yesterday svnlog, which seems to have support for Debian BTS out of the box. Maybe I just entered slightly different keywords than today when trying to find the mentioned thread on debian-devel.

Okay, I messed it up. Recently released 1.14.0 still had some artefacts from SMS handling cleanup and it should be fixed now. Besides this, experimental (not tested) support for OBEX on Siemens phones has been added and Motorola users should be finally able to get their messages. Full list of changes:

• Configurable MySQL socket path.
• More extensive SMS PDU parser tests.
• Experimental support for OBEX in Siemens.
• Support for listing messages using CMGL (bug #408).
• Parse T630 reply on CPBR (bug #420).
• Fix buffer overflows in PDU decoder.
• Properly catch invalid PDU data received from phone.
• Handle more OBEX error codes.
• Handle vCards from Yahoo and Evolution (bug #424).

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

I will try to stabilise to 1.15.0 as soon as possible, what effectively means feature freeze from now, so this testing series should be shorter than usual.

Today, when walking through some Wammu/Gammu bugs, I came to conclusion that the spam changed some people to behave insane. The email field in bug tracker is there to allow developer to contact you, for example when he makes a fix for issue you reported and wants you to test it. Entering addresses as ones at TrashMail which will vanish soon (the bug I'm talking about is two days old, what I feel is good enough reaction time from my side), will not help anybody.

Thank you firebird76 (whatever your real name is) for realizing how people are stupid.

PS: I use Mantis bug tracker, which I believe does not expose email addresses to anyone besides privileged users.

I just released new version of Gammu. There are no big changes since last testing release:

• Fallback to empty model if user specifies wrong.

For stable users there are tons of changes, most noticable are fixes in SMS encoding and decoding, 6510 protocol improvements, IrMC index access support and improved SMSD logging.

After massive processing of new queue during weekend (check graphs to get better impression, kudos to all who managed to handle hundredth of packages during weekend), new Gammu is in unstable. It is still not in shape for migration to testing, but it is much better than the one I accidentally uploaded before. Currently there are no known open regressions, so if you see something failing what used to work before, just report it!

Finally this testing series is stabilizing and there are no known regressions. The latest big regression with encoding PDU data has been just fixed. Full list of changes:

• Fixed wrong PDU encoding (bug #412).
• Provide API for cleaning SMS backup structure.
• Added testing of SMS PDU encoding.

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

I hope this will be really the last one before 1.14.0.

I just released new version of Gammu. I expected to have stable release at this time, but some important bugs appeared which forced me to change API. And while I did break this, I also did other API changes which I had longer in my mind. Besides there are lot of fixes in OBEX/IrMC code. Full list of changes:

• Fixes OBEX crash (Debian bug #446923).
• Correctly check various return values (bug #409).
• Fixed several bugs in vCard decoder.
• Removed UCS decoding heuristics, it can not work in all cases.
• Provide at least some basic information from dumb AT phones.
• SMSD now logs also error descriptions.
• SMSD can be configured not to check for security status.
• Correctly handle hard deletes on IrMC (bug #414).
• GSM_ReadConfig now returns GSM_Error instead of just bool.
• Many functions now use size_t for passing size values.
• Backups API now rather accepts format than guessing by filename.
• Increased soname due to API/ABI changes