Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Gammu

What you can probably spot from past posts on my blog, my open source contributions are heavily focused on Weblate and I've phased out many other activities. The main reason being reduced amount of free time with growing family, what leads to focusing on project which I like most. It's fun to develop it and it seems like it will work business wise as well, but that's still something to be shown in the future.

Anyway it's time to admit that I will not spend much time on other things in near future.

Earlier this year, I've resigned from being phpMyAdmin project admin. I was in this role for three years and I've been contributing to the project for 18 years. It has been time, but I haven't contributed significantly in last few months. I will stay with the project for few more months to handle smooth transition, but it's time to say good bye there.

On the Debian project I want to stay active, but I've reduced my involvement and I'm looking for maintainers for some of my packages (mostly RPM related). The special case is the phpMyAdmin package where I was looking for help since 2017, but it still didn't help from the package becoming heavily outdated with security issues what lead to it's removal from Buster. It seems that this has triggered enough attention to resurrect work on the updated packages.

Today I've gone through my personal repos on GitHub and I've archived bunch of them. These have not received any attention for years (many of them were dead by the time I've imported them to GitHub) and it's good to clearly show that to random visitors.

I'm still main developer behind Gammu, but I'm not really doing there more than occasional review of pull requests and merging them. I don't want to abandon the project without handing it out to somebody else, but the problem is that there is nobody else right now.

I've just released new versions of Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu. These are mostly bugfix releases (see individual changelogs for more details), but they bring back Wammu for Windows.

This is especially big step for Wammu as the existing Windows binary was almost five years old. The another problem with that was that it was cross-compiled on Linux and it always did not behave correctly. The current binaries are automatically produced on AppVeyor during our continuous integration.

Another important change for Windows users is addition of wheel packages to python-gammu, so all you need to use it on Windows is to pip install python-gammu.

Of course the updated packages are also on their way to Debian and to Ubuntu PPA.

Today, Gammu 1.38.5 has been released. After long period of bugfix only releases, this comes with several new noteworthy features.

The biggest feature probably is that SMSD can now handle USSD messages as well. Those are usually used for things like checking remaining credit, but it's certainly not limited to this. This feature has been contributed thanks to funding on BountySource.

You can read more information in the release announcement.

I've made several changes to the Weblate Docker container which are worth mentioning today.

First of all if you are still using nijel/weblate, you should switch to weblate/weblate. They both currently share same configuration, but it might happen that some future updates will go to the weblate owned container only.

Now back to the container changes. Since beginning we were using Django built in server. That's fine for development purposes, but it really doesn't work that well in production as it can handle only one request at time. Therefore we've switched to more robust approach using nginx + uwsgi + supervisor.

Thanks to this, the docker-compose no longer needs separate nginx server as everything is now sanely handled within the weblate container itself.

After fours years, I will again make it to DebConf, I'm looking forward to meet many great people, so if you want to meet and happen to be in Montreal next week come and say hello to me :-).

It seems I've settled down on four year schedule - I've attended DebConf09 and DebConf13 so far. Let's see if next one will come in 2021 or earlier.

It has been few months since I'm providing Windows binaries for Gammu, but other parts of the family were still missing. Today, I'm adding python-gammu.

Unlike previous attempts which used crosscompilation on Linux using Wine, this is also based on AppVeyor. Still I don't have to touch Windows to do that, what is nice :-). This has been introducted in python-gammu 2.9 and depend on Gammu 1.38.4.

What is good on this is that pip install python-gammu should now work with binary packages if you're using Python 3.5 or 3.6.

Maybe I'll find time to look at option providing Wammu as well, but it's more tricky there as it doesn't support Python 3, while the python-gammu for Windows can currently only be built for Python 3.5 and 3.6 (due to MSVC dependencies of older Python versions).

During last weeks I was finally able to push out some releases of Gammu and related tools. Those were mostly waiting for quite some time in Git, but still will be useful for many users.

Gammu 1.38.3 brings several SMSD performance improvements (I'd like to hear feedback here how much it helped in real world workloads), fixes USSD related crashes and adds support for new devices.

python-gammu 2.8 finally brings emoji fixes to Python users as well. Those were fixed in Gammu quite some time ago, but the Python API still didn't handle them properly. There was also simplification in the calls API.

Wammu release will follow shortly in next days, the most important change there being license change to GPLv3 or later.

Weblate 2.13 has been released today pretty much on the schedule. The most important change being more fine grained access control and some smaller UI improvements. There are other new features and bug fixes as well.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed quality checks on translation templates.
• Added quality check to trigger on losing translation.
• Add option to view pending suggestions from user.
• Add option to automatically build component lists.
• Default dashboard for unauthenticated users can be configured.
• Add option to browse 25 random strings for review.
• History now indicates string change.
• Better error reporting when adding new translation.
• Added per language search within project.
• Group ACLs can now be limited to certain permissions.
• The per project ALCs are now implemented using Group ACL.
• Added more fine grained privileges control.
• Various minor UI improvements.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Few months ago, I've written about getting coverage information from many platforms into one report. That approach worked, but I've always felt guilty for pushing almost thousand of files to Codecov.

This week I finally found time to revisit this and make it work better and faster. Actually just uploading these files took about 30 minutes. Together with slow tests execution (which took about 30 minutes as well), we were reaching AppVeyor build time limits and builds did timeout quite often, what is not really nice result.

I've started with rewriting the wrapper used to execute OpenCppCoverage. I've originally used Python for that, which is nice, but I thought the overhead must be noticeable. As it is not possible to execute Python script directly from CTest, it was wrapped in simple bat file, adding another overhead. Reimplementing this in C showed that there is indeed overhead, but this is not going to save more time than few minutes.

Next obvious step was to look at uploading coverage files as this is really something what should be fast and not take such enormous time. When writing the original post, I've already tried to merge coverage data using OpenCppCoverage, but that showed to be too slow to make it actually work (the testsuite didn't complete in given 60 minutes).

I was also looking at existing solutions to merge Cobertura XML files, but I've found nothing working reasonably fast. The problem is that all of these always merge two files at one step, making merging thousand files really slow job as you're constantly generating, parsing and processing the resulting xml file for 1000 times. Also these solutions are probably more generic that what I needed.

In the end these files are just simple XML and merging them should not be hard. I was able to quickly write Python script to merge them. It does not support all of the Cobertura attributes, it just merges line based coverage (as this is the only thing which OpenCppCoverage generates), but works pretty fast and reliable.

Overall the build time went down from 60 minutes to 35 minutes and I don't see much space to improve besides improving OpenCppCoverage speed, what is really out of scope for me. Actually older version (0.9.5.3) performs way faster than current one (0.9.6), which is 2-3 times slower.

Yesterday Gammu 1.38.2 has been released. This is bugfix release fixing for example USSD or MMS decoding in some situations.

The Windows binaries are available as well. These are built using AppVeyor and will help bring Windows users back to latest versions.

Full list of changes and new features can be found on Gammu 1.38.2 release page.

Would you like to see more features in Gammu? You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt or by direct donation.