Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for python-gammu

After two months of heavy development, new Gammu stable release is out. There are quite a lot of changes and I'm not really convinced it makes sense to include full list of almost 150 lines from ChangeLog, so here are the most important changes (I'm sure I missed something, but I think the list is already too big):

• Lot of SMSD related changes.
  • New DBI backend which handles nicely many databases.
  • SMSD and inject tool are now separate binaries.
  • New monitoring tool for SMSD.
  • SMSD can now run as a Windows service.
  • SMSD behaves nicely as a daemon on Linux (syslog support, SIGHUP handling, proper daemonizing, etc.).
• Merger of python-gammu.
  • Python bindings are no longer separate projects, they are now part of Gammu release.
• Better support for Nokia USB cables on Linux.
  • Gammu now has libusb-1.0 based support for Nokia USB cables.
  • This gives us performance boost and support for DKU-2 cables.
• Much more tests.
  • About 1/3 of code is now covered by test cases.
  • Dummy phone backend to allow testing without connected phone.
• General code cleanup.
  • Fixed tons of problems found by test cases, valgrind and cppcheck.
  • Reorganised code structure a bit to make clear what parts are supported.
• Documentation.
  • Several new man pages have been added, most important is documentation for SMSD and all it's features.

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

Debian users will find packages in unstable soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check repository in OpenSuse Build Service and Ubuntu in my PPA.

Okay, again delay :-). I wanted to push this version out yesterday, but real life has caught me and I did not manage to do it. So this time Gammu is released on Tuesday, but I want to get back to Monday releases next week.

If all things go without problems, this is last testing release before 1.23.0. Besides changing files structure a lot (I hope current one better matches current state of code), there are only some minor fixes and cleanups.

Full list of changes follows:

• Reorganize directory structure to match current state of things.
• Completely switch DBI driver to utf-8.
• Fixed date off by 1900 error in some cases.
• Cleanup a bit phonet driver.
• Handle properly requests for network code (bug #819).
• Allow to enter more security codes through SMSD (bug #819).
• Fixed restoring to specific folder on AT (bug #815).

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

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

Today is Monday, what means it is time for Gammu release. Main improvements are this time in DBI driver and dummy phone driver. This allowed increasing number of test cases and they revealed number of bugs in code, which were fixed. The good thing is that we now have covered 30% of code by testcases. There is still place to improve, but I think this is good milestone, because most of untested code lies in drivers for different phones, which are hard to test automatically without having real phone connected to test server.

Other thing I would like to highlight is DBI backend in SMSD. It is still new, but you should consider using it instead of old MYSQL or PGSQL backends, because it behaves much more nicely to your database and won't ruin system performance that easily (though there are still things to improve). Unfortunately it is not available on Windows right now, but I hope this will change in future.

Full list of changes follows:

• Fix some memory leaks found by cppcheck.
• Implemented reconnecting/retrying in DBI driver.
• Fix memory leaks in SMSD found by valgrind.
• Fix decoding of another Nokia message type.
• Support for passing received message ID in DBI.
• Dummy phone now supports phonebook, calendar, todo, filesystem.
• Experimental SMSD monitor support on Windows.
• Added ID for Nokia 2680 (bug #813).
• Number of retries of message send in SMSD can be configured.
• Updated SQL files to new version (mostly added useful indexes).
• Dropped own logic for generating IDs for SMS and rely on SQL server (only in DBI driver for now).

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

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

It took again one week and here comes new Gammu testing version. Again number of changes is quite impressive, to name the most important - new DBI backend for SMSD, which allows to easily support wide range of databases, SMSD now exports some information in shared memory segment, what allows monitoring of its state, python-gammu bindings now support some basic SMSD operations, libusb-1.0 based driver for Nokia cables (especially DKU-2) and last but not least, Gammu finally has fake phone driver, which can be used for testing and writing applications and performs all operations in selected directory on filesystem.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed privileges dropping in SMSD.
• SMSD inject now properly uses PhoneID.
• Improve SMSD documentation.
• Translations improvements.
• Add ID for Nokia 7373.
• Do not try to use filesystem OBEX if IrMC access was forced.
• Fix possible crash in LMB decoder.
• Avoid string length overflow in Nokia phonebook encoder.
• Introduced backward compatibility of gammu.StateMachine.SetConfig.
• Experimental dku-2 userspace driver using libusb-1.0 (fbususb).
• python-gammu can now inject messages into SMSD (gammu.SMSD object).
• SMSD stores summary counts of sent/received messages in database.
• Added gammu-smsd-monitor program to monitor state of SMSD.
• python-gammu can now monitor SMSD state.
• Do not try to use OBEX 1.0 it's too old (bug #807).
• Better parse ATI replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Better parse CSQ replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Add small delays to SMS sending/saving (bug #794).
• SMSD monitor can now run for configured number of loops.
• Added DBI backend for SMSD, so we now support wide range of databases.
• SMSD does not delete SMS from phone when it's saving has failed.
• Added SQL structure for sqlite, which can be used through DBI.
• python-gammu can run and stop SMSD.
• Initial implementation of dummy phone driver for testing.
• Allow to configure path to config from command line.
• SMSD monitor allows output in CSV.

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

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

It took more than a week this time, because I was ill, but new testing Gammu version is here. This time there are finally no really major changes, only fixes of regressions (PostgreSQL SMSD brokeness) and bugs found by testing and reported by users.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed getting of network name from saved message.
• Fixed encoding of text to some encodings in AT engine.
• Detect more Siemens CME error codes.
• Windows binary is again with MySQL support.
• Initial native support for Motorola phonebook (bug #748).
• Use getpass if available for PIN code prompt.
• Fixed parsing of phone number from incoming calls.
• Added ID for Nokia 1112.
• Dropped obsolete packaging/debian and point users to proper packages.
• Fix crash when operator logo is empty.
• Fix memory leak in SMS backup.
• Fixed processing of SMSD outbox with PostgreSQL (bug #803).
• Automatic detection of lib64 directory for installation.
• Allow separate installation of some components on Windows.

You can download sources and Windows binaries (now for first time you can select which parts you want to install) from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon and RPM users can use my repository at OpenSUSE Build Service.

PS: I'd like to thank to "j t" who kindly donated me Nokia 6822 for testing.

After another week, new Gammu testing version is out. The biggest change is integration of python-gammu into Gammu. This makes easier to test everything together and new tests revealed lot of bugs and memory leaks which were immediately fixed. Besides these changes, Windows Service support has been fixed and added possibility to run more SMSD instances.

• Fixed setting remote number for SMS in some cases.
• Fixed compilation under cygwin.
• Externalize eventlog support to ease Cygwin compilation.
• Integrate python-gammu into Gammu, they are anyway bound quite tightly together.
• Python C module is now gammu._gammu and not gammu.Core.
• Introduce testing for python module.
• Fixed decoding of formatted EMS messages.
• Fixed reading of RTTL ringtones.
• Fixed crash with too many animation frames.
• Fixed possible crash in LMB writer.
• Fixed several memory leaks.
• Better support for Samsung phones (bug #790).
• Fixed Windows Service Startup (bug #451).
• New possibility to run more instances of Windows Service (bug #451).

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

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

python-gammu has been here for more than five years and now it is gone! Well not really, I only integrated it into regular Gammu sources, what is anyway logical place where it belongs. Especially when looking on last releases, which were anyway bound together.

The fact that several past releases have to happen together for both python-gammu and Gammu is not the only reason for merge. The other two major reasons are cross-compilation and testing. Besides this, with merged source, it will be easier for some distributions to deploy newer Gammu to released products.

For testing I definitely could use some python based test framework, but I'd like to have all test results in a single place and I didn't find something what would easily integrate some python test framework with some dashboard and also would be capable of doing C testing. Also current CTest/CDash combo used in Gammu really fits my needs for good overview what is going on in daily tests, so I preferred to stay with current system.

Cross-compilation support is really missing in distutils and I was using set of hacks to make it properly produce binaries for Windows on Linux. With current CMake based setup, all this is just matter of providing Python instance to use.

On the downside, I can not really drop distutils usage, as they will still be needed for creating binary installer for Windows, unless I'll find some clever way how to do this in CMake (which I really doubt).

New version of python-gammu has been just released. It fixes possible crashes, brings compatibility with Gammu 1.22.0 and adds support for converting to and from vCard/vCalendar/iCalendar formats. Full list of changes:

• Properly use Py_ssize_t type to avoid problems on 64-bit systems.
• Properly handle phonebook Category attribute (can be a text).
• Follow new semantics of GSM_SetDebugFileDescriptor (bug #749).
• Compatibility with current gammu.
• Support for encoding/decoding vCard, vCalendar and iCalendar files.

Download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/python/

It looks like I again did same mistake with Gammu and python-gammu binaries - they started to crash randomly. It was again caused by fact, that they were linked to two C runtime libraries (msvcrt.dll and msvcr70.dll). I should make some automated check for this to avoid uploading so broken things, but I don't know any command line tool which can list DLLs which are required by exe and which works on Linux (Wine is okay too). Anyway the binaries has been just recompiled and uploaded, so if Gammu or python-gammu crashes for you, please download new version.

PS: Thanks to Olaf Leidinger, now I know how to check it automatically:

/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/bin/objdump -x filename.exe | grep "DLL Name"

New version of python-gammu has been just released. It fixes possible crashes and brings compatibility with Gammu 1.21.0. Full list of changes:

• Compatibility with current gammu.
• Use new GSM_MemoryTypeToString.
• Fix several off by one errors.

Download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/python/