Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2009

After lot of development, I finally decided to release new testing release of Gammu.

The biggest changes are in SMS daemon, which got lot of improvements and is now in separate binary gammu-smsd. It can log better (support for syslog and Windows Event Log has been added), it can work as a proper daemon or Windows Service, it can be debugged easier (Gammu logs go to same log as other messages, SQL queries can be logged), can reload configuration on the fly.

In libGammu, debugging has also improved (you can now use callback to process messages), some memory leaks were fixed and some minor bugs has been fixed.

Command line interface now supports text for text messages to be entered through parameter and not only using standard input, it has a new command chekfirmware which obsoletes UsePhoneDB configuration option and other bug fixes has happened, for example messages sending is now again working on Windows.

And last but not least, SMS daemon, all related things and gammu configuration files now have man pages, which boosts documentation level from none to almost perfect ;-).

As a special bonus for Czech users, Gammu translation is now more complete and all new man pages are translated to Czech.

Full list of changes:

• Fix some memory leaks found by cppcheck.
• Fix unsafe sprintf usage in some modules.
• Improve debugging facilities to use state machine debug configuration when possible.
• Separate SMS daemon out of gammu binary.
• SMSD now requires [gammu] section in config file.
• UsePhoneDB option replaced by chekfirmware command.
• Added pkgconfig support for gsmsd (SMSD library).
• Debug logging can be handled by custom function in application.
• SMSD log now includes gammu log messages.
• SMSD now can log to syslog.
• SMSD can now deamonize itself.
• All callbacks can now pass user data along.
• SMSD can now write PID file.
• Added man pages for gammu-smsd(1), gammu-smsdrc(5) and gammurc(5).
• SMSD can now natively run as a Windows service (bug #451).
• SMSD debugging can be now enabled by DebugLevel directive.
• Proper reconnecting support for MySQL.
• Better error logging of PostgtreSQL SMSD service.
• SMSD now properly frees allocated memory.
• SMSD now handles SIGHUP for rereading configuration.
• Added LSB init script for SMSD.
• SMSD can now log to stderr/stdout.
• RunOnReceive now can get IDs of received messages.
• Avoid duplicating of same code in command line and tests for messages displaying.
• New binary gammu-smsd-inject to inject messages to SMSD.
• Gammu binary now does not support any SMSD operations.
• Sending TEXT message now accepts text using -text parameter.
• Improved logging differentiation of SMSD log messages.
• Properly remove messages from queue when sending fails (bug #778).
• Use own test handler instead of asserts.
• Separate gammu and libgammu messages, libgammu no longer sets textdomain.
• Use po4a for translating man pages.
• Dump more information in dct3trac, thanks to Duncan Salerno.
• SMSD cal log to Windows Event Log.
• Added man pages for SMSD backend services.
• Dropped static configuration files for MSVC, they were broken anyway and CMake now works good with MSVC.
• Script gammu-config supports also cdialog.
• Reduce stack usage on message composing (fixes crash on Windows).
• Fixed returned saved location on AT engine.
• Added support for dropping privileges in SMSD.

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

Debian users will find packages in experimental as soon as they will go through NEW queue.

Joey, I really like rel-vcs proposal. On the other side it misses few good things which were already found for Vcs-* fields (there is already no XS- prefix for quite a long time).

First it misses information about branch. On git, you will automatically get a master, but for SVN, you need to point to some branch, otherwise you get really lot of stuff. And I think that practise should be same as for Vcs-Svn - to point the field to trunk URL.

The second thing which this proposal misses is Vcs-Browser. It would not be useful for tools like webcheckout, but it would be great to have support for it in browsers or in plugins such as Operator. How about using type="browser" for this?

SMS daemon in Gammu is one of it's widely deployed applications. However I never really liked the way how it is integrated into Gammu. I did not know much the code, so I did not want to touch it. But recent posts on gammu-users mailing list convinced me to do something about it.

So in next Gammu release, many things will change. The most important thing is that SMSD is no longer part of gammu binary, but has an own binary gammu-smsd. Among other reasons, this will allow to split binary packages in distributions and reducing dependencies of gammu package (database backends are used only is SMSD).

The other changes are more platform specific and will allow better integration of a daemon into system. Linux users will benefit from proper daemon support and optional logging to syslog, while Windows users can now use SMSD as a Windows service.

And as a bonus, SMSD and it's configuration file now filanny have man pages: gammu-smsd and gammu-smsdrc.

All mentioned changes are already in SVN, but I want to do some polishing before making a testing release. The testing release will definitely happen in next week, however impatient users can download SVN snapshots and test them.