Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Wammu

While working on Gammu, I still wonder why people who want to connect their phone to computer buy phones from vendors who use own proprietary protocol or do not share any documentation. Then they come to Gammu mailing list and/or bug tracker and want Gammu to support their phone. Sometimes the fix is easy, but usually it is quite lot of work to debug unknown protocol.

I know this situation quite good from past. I had Alcatel phone, which was using proprietary protocol for access to in phone contacts and events. Fortunately Alcatel released synchronisation software for these phones (it of course runs only on Windows) which had enabled debugging and it was quite easy to understand protocol thanks to logs it could produce. But as newer phones with some extensions appeared, maintaining this became harder and harder.

When I looked for new phone, I decided to buy Sony-Ericcsson K750i phone. Writing support for most of functionality (well in fact all I need) was just matter of few days. The reason why it was so fast was that this phones is using open standards (e.g. OBEX, IrMC) and vendor specific AT commands are documented in freely available documents.

It's your choice how good will your phone interoperate with computer. If you buy well documented piece of hardware, chance to have it fully supported is much higher.

If you want to follow SVN commits on some of my SVN repositories, you can subscribe to appropriate maling list, which gets notification on each SVN commit. I hope I set up mailman correctly and everything will work as I expect :-).

This list is also automatically forwared to packages.qa.debian.org, so you can also subscribe there for Debian package changes.

Today last batch of Wammu and python-gammu has been converted to Subversion. It was almost painless, it only required lot of CPU time. All project pages should now link to Subversion repositories and snapshots. Also all projects now have publicly available statistics on http://www.ohloh.net and http://cia.vc.

Unfortunately for python-gammu and Wammu are statistics a bit messed up - for Wammu ohloh didn't find license header, which is in almost every file, in python-gammu, doc string comments are not counted as being comments, so without it project has obviously to low comments ratio.

Anyway I was quite impressed by code grow of Wammu in last half year, because I still thing I don't have enough time for Wammu. However if their stats are true, the code amount grows quite fast in last months.

After more playing with Tailor, I managed to hack it enough to convert my Arch repositories to Subversion. Move from distributed to non distributed VCS migth look as step backwards, but I have pretty good reasons for this:

• Subversion is widely used and there is big chance that potential contributor will know how to use it. This lowers barrier for contributing (especially when compared to current Arch/Bazaar).
• Subversion sucks much less than CVS which is other well known VCS.
• If I want to work distributed I can still use Bazaar-NG with foreign branch features.

The conversion is currently on the way and will probably need some time (about half of Gammu revisions have been converted so far).

It's probably time to give up. I tried to tweak tailor to make it able to convert my repositories to Subversion for several times, but without any success. It also fails to convert it to Bazaar-NG or Git. Those are list of all VCS I consider to use in future.

I'd prefer to switch to subversion, because it is widely used and most people will be willing to use it, but I have not find any way to convert current VCS data to it. Maybe I will start with empty repository and forget the history.

I finally managed to make screenshots page on wammu.eu. Now you can see small thumbnails directly on first page and it really looks like screenshots page :-).

Meanwhile also Gammu Phone Database got some improvements, but you should not notice anything there (besides added BenQ manufacturer).

Yesterday I decided to register wammu.eu domain for Wammu. One of reasons was that almost all other wammu.* variants are already taken by speculants and this name sounds good enough. The other reason is to give Wammu better accessible website. The old URL was not bad, but domain name sounds better :-). Also separate domain will allow later to have different CMS and/or design of Wammu pages, what is something I'd like to see, but don't have skills for that.

So please use http://wammu.eu for linking to Wammu. The old URLs are redirected to new location and they will stay redirected for long.

If there are any problems on new website, please notify me.

In time when I was working on Wammu 0.18, I realized, that making release not very often is bad thing. You usually get same reports over the development period and telling people that you have fixed it, but not yet in any released version, doesn't make them happy.

As you can see from past weeks, I switched to making releases as often as possible. I will try to add new features quickly after release and then give the code some time for stabilisation (well, this would need a bit more testers than I currently have). I'd like to avoid delay longer than month between releases, if there is something to release (I doubt there will be any major changes in python-gammu in near future).

This time the release is quickly after previous one and I hope it will be better quality than previous one (especially for Windows users). Wammu 0.19 has been just released, list of changes is:

• Improved SMS recipient list handling.
• Can save and load SMS recipient list.
• Fix crash on Windows when username contains non-ascii chars.
• Fix Windows binary crashes.
• Support for sending file to phone.
• Support for task bar icon (thanks to Rene Peters).
• Fixed debug log on Windows.
• Fixed error handler on Windows.

Thanks to Rene Peters, next Wammu release will come with tray icon support. I was always too lazy to look how it should be implemented and it turns out to be only few lines of code :-).

Anyway if there is something else you miss in Wammu, don't afraid to ask for it, there is always a chance, that somebody will implement it.