Manage data in CDMA phones from LG, Samsung, Sanyo and others
BitPim uses SourceForge for project management. You can get to all the source, trackers (bugs, feature requests etc), mailing list and more at sourceforge.net/projects/bitpim
The source is stored in Subversion at sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=75211.
You can check it out using the Subversion tools for your platform. Note that
the main code is at
https://bitpim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/bitpim/trunk/bitpim.
There is a bitpim-devel mailing list for developers where the techie action happens. You should also subscribe to bitpim-cvs-checkins if you want notification of all changes that happen to the source.
BitPim is written in a programming language named Python. In addition to running well on many different platforms, Python also has that most important feature of being easy to read. It is also very easy to learn, and VERY productive.
Here are three pages that help you navigate your way through the code.
All the code coloured in, and using a cross referencer. Library and function calls are hyperlinked to their definitions. (The cross referencer isn't perfect ... yet)
Documentation generated from appropriate comments in the source code.
When we used CVS, this page showed the most recent 500 changes with diffs so you can see what has been happening recently. If you know of a tool that does the same thing for Subversion then please let us know.
If you have standalone code that implements some feature that isn't in Python, feel free to contribute that. It can be used as the basis for Python code, or as a test suite. The hard part is figuring out what to do and how to do it, and you will have already solved that :-)
You can do your development on Windows, Linux or Mac. If you do any work on the user interface, you should try your code out on at least two of the platforms since there are often minor platform specific differences that should be taken into account.
You will need to download and install the list of packages below. For
Python packages that don't come with a binary installer, there is usually a
setup.py file in the top level of what you downloaded. Simply
type python setup.py install and the package will be
installed. You will need to have administrative/root access.
If you want to work on USB code, or using the USB module then you will need C compilers and some other tools. Please post on bitpim-devel for further details.
You muse use Python 2.5. Linux already comes with Python. MacOS X 10.3 does as well. For other
platforms, grab it from www.python.org. If you are on Linux with an older version then you can
install 2.5 alongside your existing version by building from source rpms
on python.org
wxPython is the graphics toolkit used. Grab it from www.wxpython.org. Note that you must use version 2.8.8.1 and you must use the Unicode version built for Python 2.5.
Linux users should use the GTK2 version and will probably need to rebuild from source on all versions of Linux. The simplest way is to download the GTK2 source rpm from the binaries download of wxPython and then do one of the following depending on your distro. For all commands it is assumed that you are root. If you want to do the building as a non-root user, you need to setup your rpm build environment as detailed here. After the rpm is built, scroll back a bit in the console to see exactly where the built file ended up.Remember to delete any existing wxPython rpms from your rpmdir before building, or make sure you specify the correct version number in the install lines (rpm -U)
RPM based distro
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/wxpython/wxPython2.8-2.8.8.1-1.src.rpm rpmbuild --rebuild --define 'pyver 2.5' wxPython2.8-2.8.8.1-1.src.rpm rpm -U rpmdir/wxPython2.8-gtk2-*.rpm rpmdir/wxPython-common-*.rpmGentoo
emerge rpm wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/wxpython/wxPython2.8-2.8.8.1-1.src.rpm rpmbuild --rebuild --define 'pyver 2.5' wxPython2.8-2.8.8.1-1.src.rpm rpm -U --nodeps rpmdir/wxPython2.8-gtk2-*.rpm rpmdir/wxPython-common-*.rpmDebian
Debian stable is way behind the times, so you may find something appropriate in testing. Alternatively, the instructions below should work.
apt-get install alien apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev freeglut3-dev python2.5-dev wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/wxpython/wxPython2.8-2.8.8.1-1.src.rpm rpmbuild --rebuild --define 'pyver 2.5' wxPython2.8-2.8.8.1-1.src.rpm cd rpmdir alien packagenames.rpm dpkg -i whatever alien called them
pySerial is used to interface with the serial port. You must use version 2.4. Grab it from pyserial.wiki.sourceforge.net/pySerial
PyWin32 is used by pySerial to do the underlying nasty work of accessing the Windows API. Your must use Build 212. Grab it from sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32
APSW is the wrapper used for the SQLite database that stores some BitPim data. You must use APSW version 3.5.9-r2 with SQLite version 3.6.1. Grab it from code.google.com/p/apsw.
Check out the BitPim code from Subversion. I recommend checking it out
to a directory named c:\projects\bitpim or something similar
on other platforms. The subversion section has
pointers to various graphical and command line clients you can use.
You need paramiko if you want to use BitFling. You must use version 1.7.4 (Desmond). You can get it from http://www.lag.net/paramiko/
You need pyCrypto if you want to use BitFling. You must use version 2.0.1. It can be downloaded from www.amk.ca/python/code/crypto.html
On Windows you don't have to build anything. On Linux and Mac you should build the USB module if you use an LG phone with a straight USB cable (ie not USB to serial). On all platforms the native C version of the string matcher is faster than the Python implementation. The simple way to build everything is:
$ python packaging/buildmodules.py
Note that you will need Swig on your path and libusb installed to build the USB module. To build the string matcher you need to have a C compiler in your path (MinGW on Windows - you only need MinGW itself not MSYS).
This is how to build them the manual way
Build usb library (optional - Linux & Mac only)- You need to build the USB library if you want direct USB support. Run the relevant build script in the
native/usbdirectory. Note that you will need Swig installed (version 1.3.19 or above), as well as the header files and library (devel) parts of libusb, and a C compiler. (The relevant usb package is named libusb-dev on Debian, libusb-devel on Redhat and just plain libusb on Gentoo. You can also download it from libusb.sourceforge.net where you will also find the Mac version.).
Compile string matcher (optional)The string matcher code uses the Jaro Winkler algorithm. There is both a C and Python implementation in the module. If you have a large phonebook then you will want the C version as it is much faster.
windows> python setup.py build --compile=mingw32 windows> copy build\lib.win32-2.3\jarow.pyd Mac/Linux# python setup.py build ; cp build/*/jarow.* .
python bp.py should run BitPim from a console.
There is a developer console (python interpreter with access to all the internals) builtin. Find the current config file (Edit > Settings will tell you the name) and add a key in the default section add:
console = 1
You can also add print statements to see what is going
on. For whole program debugging and tweaking try the pythonwin or Idle
IDEs that come with Python. If you are want to enter the Python debugger
at a certain point of code, add the following line:
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
Note that the debugger won't behave well if you have the developer console turned on.
You can put it in an if statement or similar trigger. Once the
tracepoint is hit, type up and you will be in the code and
can step, print variables or anything else that takes your fancy. Type
help for a list of commands.
The author actually uses xemacs with a few print statements every now and then.
Ensure you do a Subversion update every now and then to pick up
updates that other people have made to the code. If you would like to
supply a patch, then do svn diff and capture the output.
Don't worry about your patch being perfect, or even working. We will happily adapt, rewrite or repurpose it. You will have done the hard work of figuring out something useful and broadly how to do it :-)
All patch submissions are considered to be under the BitPim (GPL) license. [Please check the LICENSE file in the source tree as there are some relaxations, for example allowing linking with OpenSSL]. Do not submit them if you do not agree with the full terms of the license. Your copyright is however retained, or you are free to sign over your copyright to the project.
Usually your first step is adding or improving support for your phone.
You can find documentation in the dev-doc directory.
If you would like to work on other things, then have a look at the todo list. Mail the bitpim-devel list if you intend to embark on any of those, or mention what areas you want to work on and ask for suggestions.