Year 2009 summary

The year 2009 is over and it's time to summarize what has happened in Gammu world. There were definitely more changes, but these are the ones which stayed in my memory and thus should be the most important ones.

The biggest changes have happened inside Gammu SMSD. It has become separate binary, new DBI backend, monitoring capabilities and dozens of smaller bug fixes and improvements. SMSD is really starting to be more important part of Gammu suite now.

Gammu engine itself gained support for some new phones. The biggest improvements were done in various extensions to AT commands, so you now have much better support for Samsung and Motorola phones. However there are still lot of things to improve as most of functionality is currently read only.

Originally Gammu used to decode PDU (SMS data) by a little cryptic code, which used some offsets to actually read the parts of it. Last year this code was replaced in 6510 and AT driver by generic PDU parser, which is much safer and is able to handle better various error conditions. For 6510 driver this change was possible by analyzing lot of SMS file dumps and understanding it's structure instead of wild guessed offsets which were used previously and broke from time time.

The little technical change was that python-gammu is now part of Gammu sources. The reson for this is tight integration of those and it was anyway needed to release both at same time in past.

Besides all these changes, whole Gammu is more covered by test cases, what allows us to automatically detect more possible problems.

This moves us a bit to infrastructure changes. First important thing (which I did at DebConf, where several people finally convinced me to do this) was switch development to use Git version control system. For now our repositories are hosted at Gitorious and SourceForge.net. Later. in autumn, new website for both Gammu and Wammu was launched. It contains much more information than old one and all information is available in one place.

For Wammu, it was quite quiet year, most changes were only bug fixes and not much progress has happened there. Wammu would really welcome some fresh blood.

Publicado el 2 de enero de 2010 por Michal Čihař