I just released version 0.28 of Wammu. This release fixes various problems found by users. Full list of changes:

• Fixed freeze while searching for Bluetooth devices.
• Fixed guided configuration of Bluetooth devices (no more complains about not existing device).
• Fixed saving of backups to folder with non ASCII names.
• Validation is less strict and allows hopefully all number.

This week I finally realized where problem with random crashes in Wammu and python-gammu lies - python-gammu was using two version of C library - mscvrt.dll and mscvr71.dll. First one came from Gammu and second one from Python. Starting with 1.19.0, Gammu is built with mscvr71.dll and random crashes are gone. Any tester did not report problems with Windows binary, so I decided to make it finally an official release.

So after year or more Windows users can finally use up to date Wammu version! Fortunately I can produce this version without even touching Windows. Thanks to tools such as MinGW and Wine, everything from compiling to generating installer can be scripted and done automatically on Linux!

After half day of playing with Wine, MinGW and friends, I managed to be able to automatically build Windows versions of both python-gammu and Wammu. However I do not have environment to actually test these versions (except for Wine), so I would really welcome if some Windows users could do some testing. I expect some strange crashes at beginning, but hopefully we will be able fix it to produce working Wammu version for Windows in future.

You can get the installer here: http://tmp.cihar.com/wammu-0.26-setup.exe

It's NOT final or stable version, but as the only changes which happened since last release were either minor or related to cross compilation, it should be equal to combination of Gammu 1.16.0, python-gammu 0.24 and Wammu 0.25, so don't be confused by versions.

When Ubuntu announced public availability of Personal Package Archives, I thought it might be good to use it to provide up to date Gammu related packages. After successful registration I uploaded Gammu package and no reaction so far, so I'll wait.

However this memorised me that I wanted to use OpenSUSE Build Service for same purpose some time ago. I filled in registration and as I didn't receive any email about being accepted, I absolutely forgot about that. Now just tried to log in and it works. So you can now have access to latest Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages for most recent RPM distributions (Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2006, Mandriva 2007, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE Factory, SLES 9 and SLE 10). I could not test them so any feedback is welcome :-). You can find all packages on overview page or directly in download folders.

Playing with spec files after long time was quite painful, but I got to it after I managed the hardest thing - how to make build dependencies which will work on all these distros.

Wammu just got one of long wanted features - notification on incoming calls. It uses D-Bus and Desktop Notifications, so you are probably lost without some modern Linux desktop. The implementation was quite easy, if I would know that using notifications is so easy, I would have written this sooner :-).

So if you have phone connected to Wammu and somebody calls you, notification pops up and allows you to accept or reject the call. I doubt anybody needs more than this :-).

I just released version 0.22 of Wammu. This is again mostly bug fix release, which fixes various bugs reported by users.

• Fixed errors in locales and applied stricter checking.
• Fixed various crashes.

You might have noticed that current Wammu is not available for Windows. The reason is simple - I was not able to produce working binary in reasonable time. Python-gammu itself seems to work, but when I run Wammu, it crashes quite soon. I tried to debug it for few evenings, but I was not successful.

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.

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.

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.