Michal Čihař - Archive for 2/2007

After long development, Wammu 0.18 has been just released. New features:

• Better setup.py to use more of distutils.
• .mo locales are generated on build and not included in VCS.
• Show only existing devices on Windows (this requires pywin32).
• Now requires wxPython at least 2.6.2.
• Support for reporting in Gammu Phone Database.
• Automatically asks user for feedback after month of usage.
• GUI more follows HIG on target platform (button placement).
• Add wildcard search possibility.
• Use gammu configuration for phone connection instead of own.

Yes you read it correctly, here finally comes Wammu with configuration wizard and talkback to phone database! Besides this huge change, this release will make also Windows users happy, because it finally contains current python-gammu and Gammu.

python-gammu 0.19 has been just released. New features:

• Fix crash on wrongly configured locales.
• Added suport for SendFilePart.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. Changes to latest testing version are relatively small:

• Added include paths to MSVC configuration files.
• Support for sending file to phone (--sendfile).
• Russian translation update (Acid Jack).
• Fixed possible uninitialised value in date decoding (Stanislav Brabec).
• Fixed reading of contacts from Samsung.
• Fixed vCard handling for Siemens (bug #72).

Stay tuned, release weekend will continue ;-).

I still more and more think, that I should move out of Bazaar to some more maintained piece of software for version control. The biggest problem I currently see, that I was not able to convert by Bazaar repositories to some other format. I tried to convert to Bazaar-NG by booth BzrTools and Tailor, but none of them succeeded, then I tried conversion to Git, but Tailor failed also on this task.

Maybe I will try Subversion, which is now very widely used software, although it has some annoyances. I originally wanted distributed VCS, because I was often offline at home, but this is not the case anymore, so using centralised VCS on my own server should not be a big problem.

Yesterday, I hacked last part migration to new Wammu configuration scheme (Wammu now does not have separate configuration to Gammu, but shares it) together with brand new [configuration wizard].

Before I release all those major changes as 0.18, I'd like to have some feedback what this change breaks. There is lot of new code within this release and I'd really like to avoid releasing 0.19 shortly after this just because some stupid error.

So if you have time, please download snapshot and try to work with it for a while. Report found problems to bug tracker. Thanks!

Wammu now finally has initial support for Gammu Phone Database. I talked a lot about this and now I finally wrote some code for it. It allows you to fill in values in program, all basic information (phone manufacturer and model, connection type), are automatically prefilled from what Wammu already knows. The dialog itself is more or less a copy of same web page, as you can see on following image:

python-gammu 0.18 has been just released. New features:

• Cleaned up build system.
• Support for crosscompilation using MinGW32.
• Compatibility with current gammu releases and CMake build system.

If you are not Czech speaking, you can safely ignore this post :-).

I just hacked another script for creating StarDict dictionary from outer source. This times is it dictionary of Czech foreign words. You can find it on same page as English-Czech dictionary.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. There is quite a lot of changes:

• Do not ship make-release in tarball.
• Fixed wrong encoding of text to vCard when last field was missing.
• Fix crash when deleting entry from OBEX using LUIDs.
• Improve detection of invalid config file (bug #68).
• Support for MinGW cross compilation including Bluetooth and IrDA.
• Support for generating installer using CPack.
• Add Nokia 6030b ID.
• Full support for enconding recurrency in vCard.

This release first comes with precompiled Windows binaries and Windows installer!

After some playing with distutils to make cross compilation using them possible, I finally gave up. Maybe I did not understand some part of guide, but resulting library only crashes Python.

So I googled once more and I found another approach to cross compile Python extensions for Windows on Linux.

And it was quite simple to do it. First you need Windows installer for Python. Now you need to get dll and includes out of this. I decided to leave hard work on Wine and hoped it will work:

/usr/bin/msiexec /i /tmp/python-2.5.msi

Now you have installed Python somewhere in ~/.wine/drive_c. All what is remaining is tuning of makefiles from original howto. You can also look on code for python-gammu which deals this issue.

Thanks to Matthew Mueller for great howto! BTW: I tested it with Python 2.5 and MinGW 3.4.5.