tangoGPS 0.99.4 - now more sports fun, revive your Freerunner

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Marcus Bauer <marcus.bauer at gmail.com> writes:
>
> Hi,
> 
> long time no see. A new release of tangoGPS is out with some major
> stuff plenty of little improvements, still getting even a bit 
> faster and snappier here and there.

Cool--

Did you see the message that I posted last week about the updates that
we've made in the FoxtrotGPS branch so far?

I've tried to structure the branch-and-merge history such that it's
easy to read through, and it's quite easy to get diffs and changelogs
for individual features/fixes; for example: I reconstructed the missing
GladeXML file, which it seems like you mentioned wanting to do, last fall,
in response to Debain bug #546336 <http://bugs.debian.org/546336>:

    At one point or other this needs re-engineering. I had already
    planned to do this during my summer vacation but then I got an
    Arduino board and some other gadgets and my vacation was over
    before I started developing on tangogps.

Along the way, several memory-leaks and weird behavioural bugs were fixed
(e.g.: window-objects never being deallocated even though they were
never reused, buttons in one window closing other unrelated windows,
attempts to invoke GTK+ functions on NULL pointers); all of that work
exists in an isolated branch with as little interference as possible
from other tasks--I think that the only non-GUI branches that were merged
into that one are a branch containing a bunch of Autotools cleanup and fixes
(files getting installed to the wrong paths, obvious portability problems,
a whole bunch of warnings, constructs that made it difficult to branch-off
and then contribute changes back upstream, etc.) and the changeset in which
I switched the option-parser to GLib's `GOption' parsing  infrastructure
(which I see you've also now done in tangoGPS).

We've also incorporated libgps, which gets us full support for both the old
and new gpsd protocols--as well as for addressing servers and ports by name
rather than just by IP/number--all totally transparent to the end user.

It looks like the changes that you've made in tangoGPS 0.99.4 *don't*
actually include support for the new JSON-based gpsd protocol
(contrary to what it says on your weblog...); rather, it just supports
*some* deployments of more recent gpsd codebases if the servers are
configured and built with support for the old NMEA-based protocol.
As far as I can tell, tangoGPS is still unable to actually parse the
new-protocol JSON streams that come from the gpsd server....

To go along with those improvements, Timo Jyrinki has also contributed
an i18n fix that allows the .desktop file to be translatable, and there
are many other improvements also.

If you haven't already, it would be great if you could take a look
and provide some comment on which changes you'd like to fold into
your branch and which changes you'd like to avoid incorporating.