Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for python-gammu

Gammu release day

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.

python-gammu for Windows

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).

Gammu family releases

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.

Gammu release day

There has been some silence on the Gammu release front and it's time to change that. Today all Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu have been released. As you might guess all are bugfix releases.

List of changes for Gammu 1.37.3:

  • Improved support for Huawei E398.
  • Improved support for Huawei/Vodafone K4505.
  • Fixed possible crash if SMSD used in library.
  • Improved support for Huawei E180.

List of changes for python-gammu 2.6:

  • Fixed error when creating new contact.
  • Fixed possible testsuite errors.

List of changes for Wammu 0.41:

  • Fixed crash with unicode home directory.
  • Fixed possible crashes in error handler.
  • Improved error handling when scanning for Bluetooth devices.

All updates are also on their way to Debian sid and Gammu PPA.

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

Gammu 1.37.2

Yesterday, Gammu 1.37.1 and Gammu 1.37.2 have been released. As usual it collects bug fixes and minor improvements.

Full list of changes in 1.37.1:

  • Properly report errors in HEX encoded strings from SMSD SQL backends.
  • Configurable SMSD table names.
  • Improved support for Huawei E303.
  • Improved support for Vodafone K4511.
  • Improved support for Telit M2M modules.

Full list of changes in 1.37.2:

  • Fixed compilation of SMSD.

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

Bug squashing in Gammu

I've not really spent much time on Gammu in past months and it was about time to do some basic housekeeping.

It's not that there would be too much of new development, I rather wanted to go through the issue tracker, properly tag issues, close questions without response and resolve the ones which are simple to fix. This lead to few code and documentation improvements.

Overall the list of closed issues is quite huge:

Do you want more development to happen on Gammu? You can support it by money.

python-gammu 2.5

It has been quite some time since last python-gammu release and it's time to push fixes to the users.

This is really just a bugfix release collecting minor fixes and fixes testsuite with recent Gammu versions.

Full list of changes:

  • Compatibility with Gammu >= 1.36.7

python-gammu 2.3

New version of python-gammu has been released yesterday.

The most important change is that it changes license to GNU GPL version 2 or later. This is only cosmetic change and mostly affects only Python code as the C side can not really be changed due to Gammu license.

Full list of changes:

  • License changed tp GPL version 2 or later.
  • Documentation improvements.

python-gammu 2.2

After recent porting python-gammu to Python 3, it was quite obvious to me that new release will have some problems. Fortunately they have proven to be rather cosmetic and no big bugs were found so far.

Anyway it's time to push the minor fixes to the users, so here comes python-gammu 2.2. As you can see, the changes are pretty small, but given that I don't expect much development in the future, it's good to release them early.

Packaging python-gammu

After Monday release of separate Gammu and python-gammu, the obvious task was to get the new package to distributions.

First I've started with Debian packages, what was quite easy as from quite complex CMake + Python package it is now purely CMake and it was mostly about removing stuff. Soon the updated Gammu package was uploaded to experimental. Once having that ready, I've also update the backports for Ubuntu and these are available in Gammu PPA. Creating new python-gammu package was a bit harder as this is the first Python 3 compatible package I've created, but it's now ready and sitting in the NEW queue.

While working on python-gammu package, I've realized that some of the data used in testsuite are missing in the tarball. While not being critical, this is definitely not nice, so I've decided to release python-gammu 2.1 today. It also includes fixes for some corner cases found by coverity.

For openSUSE the packaging was quite easy as well, stripping out unneeded parts of Gammu package went smoothly and it's now in hardware project, SR to Factory is pending. With python-gammu it turned out to be much harder as the testsuite had failed there with some strange error coming out of libdbi. After looking deeper into it, the problem is in new return type available in Git snapshot openSUSE is shipping. Fortunately producing fix was quite easy, so next Gammu upstream will handle that properly and package in hardware project is already patched. You can now use python-python-gammu from devel:languages:python and SR to Factory is pending as well.