The origins of gsmd

[Alan Jones]

Hi,

So I am sure nobody cares for a new guy asking "why?", but I cannot seem to find any discussion about the origins of
gsmd and its lib. I guess I have two core questions about how things are currently headed:

First, I am interested in the origins of the libgsm<->gsmd protocol. The wiki clearly states that it is undocumented,
which is perfectly reasonable. My question comes in as the "official" IPC mechanism in openmoko appears to be DBus. Was
there a reason that a proprietary socket protocol was desired for IPC between gsmd client and gsmd?

Is there somewhere that documents the "vision" for how things will move around in the system from UART to user
interface? I suspect that there is a layer which I am not aware of to explain all this.


Second, I am looking to understand the benefits to developing our own AT command daemon from the ground up. This project
seems very interested in leveraging existing technologies, and it surprised me to see such ground-up development on this
front. One project which seems to implement a ton of the things which this project needs to leverage (albeit with a
Nokia focus) is gnokii. It is even implemented on top of glib, and includes a pretty reasonable UI on X/GTK. Especially
on the SMS front, there is a ton of work involved in implementing a robust SMS client, and it has been done several
times before. 

The other body of code which I am aware of is gsmlib. I have personally worked with it, and seems like it might provide
a very good subset of the functionality desired for this project and a good foundation to work from. One area of concern
with gsmlib is the license was home-brew, so there have been a few questions over time about its compatibility with GPL.

Anybody have any insight or thoughts?

-Alan