$Id$ This is the gpsd to-do list. If you're viewing it with Emacs, try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t and browsing through the outline headers. Ctl-C Ctl-a will unfold them again. For contribution guidelines and internals documentation, please see . The list of bugs exposed by gpsd in other software has moved to . See also the GPSD bug tracker at ** Bugs in gpsd and its clients: *** Support for the True North magnetic compass is currently broken Massimo Burcheri reported that it broke somewhere between rev 3654 and 3722. We think this is a shallow bug, but we can't fix it without test hardware. If TNT support is a problem for you, and you can't fix the driver yourself and send us the patch, contact Bill Powell at True North Technologies and tell him he needs to reverse his refusal to send us an eval unit. *** gpsd eating the processor? We've had a report that trunk gpsd eats the processor in some situations, apparently due to spinning in a repeating open-close loop on some devices. I've never seen this; the person who reported the bug mentined it on #gpsd but has since gone silent. *** SiRF 15-second lag The tendency of SiRF chips to lag real-time by 15 seconds or so under some (unexplained) circumstances is still...unexplained. Or, rather, we have several different possible explanations and have not been able to verify any of them. Note, this is not properly a gpsd problem, but it may well be there is some sort of mode switch we should be uttering. ** To do: *** Cleanup after the big protocol rewrite **** ?DEVICE testing The ?DEVICE invocations corresponding to old B, C, and N still need testing on live devices. **** The Python client library presently speaks only old protocol. **** The regreession-test driver's raw-mode test relies on old protocol. **** gpsmon's client mode still relies on old protocol **** cgps.c still relies on old protocol (that's Jeff Francis's problem). **** Client-side support for AIS-JSON While gpsd will ship AIS JSON when attached to a transceiver, the C client library doen't unpack the JSON into the C structs defined in gps.h as yet. This should be a relatively simple coding job, maybe two man-days of work counting time to build the unit tests. **** Client-side support for RTCM3-JSON RTCM3 support is nonexistent due to a lack of suitable test loads. (We have binary RTCM3; what we need is a *pair* of files, one that is binary RTCM3 and the other that is the identical content dumped in some sort of readable textual format.) *** Complete and test the speed/parity/stopbit methods in the drivers These are used for the 'B' command. All work for 8N1. **** superstar2: not implemented (driver is unfinished) **** italk: not implemented (but could be) **** tsip: speed tested, parity and stop-bit switching not tested **** sirf: speed tested, parity and stop-bit switching not tested **** evermore: speed tested, rejects parity/stopbit setting **** ubx: fully implemented, parity and stop-bit switching not tested **** zodiac: fully implemented, not tested **** navcom.c: speed tested, rejects parity/stopbit setting SiRF, UBX, TSIP, and even Zodiac can support non-8N1 modes; these need to be tested. *** Support the D-Bus signals recognized by libgypsy Ian Holmes's Gypsy daemon is a pale shadow of GPSD, but his ideas about signalling D-Bus client apps only on fix changes are good. We should support the signal set described here: . *** Command to ship RTCM corrections to a specified device At the moment, if a GPS accepts RTCM corrections and they are available, gpsd ships them to the serial device from which the GPS is reporting fix data. Some GPSes have auxiliary ports for RTCM; there should be a (privileged) command to redirect RTCM connections. *** libgps should try to automatically try to reconnect when a poll fails Petter Reinholdtsen suggests: At the moment, when a gpsd client using libgps is connected to the gpsd server, and the server is restarted, the client loses the connection and do not update any more. It would be nice if the gps_poll() and gps_query() would try to reconnect to the server if the read() and write() calls on the tcp socket fail. To test this, start gpsd first (/etc/init.d/gpsd start), xgps second, and then restart gpsd (/etc/init.d/gpsd restart). The xgps client will fail to update any more. I realised how nice this feature would be while comparing the xgps client to the roadgps client (part of the roadmap package). The roadgps client would reconnect to the new server and keep updating as soon as the server was available. :) On second thought, and after discussing this on the gpsd mailing list, I believe the reconnect need to be handled by the applications in addition to the library. Applications will commonly use the file descriptor to detect incoming data, and this file descriptor will change on reconnect. So I rephrase my wish, and ask for reconnect functionality in xgps instead. It will make sure the library support reconnects, and also provide an example for other clients using the library. (ESR thinks maybe this ought to be done at library level anyway, with users warned that the gps_fd member of the gps_data_t structure may change on reconnect and shouldn't be cached. This wouldn't be hard to implement, but it would change gps_data_t and require a library version bump.) This is Berlios FR #3789. *** Full Python wrapper for libgpsd This would be useful for test code of all kinds. *** New features for xgps. Add J option checkbox. Maybe embed the speedometer widget from xgpspeed in some of the unused space and nuke xgpsspeed. *** Per-driver restore of changed config settings on exit. This is a solved problem for generic NMEA, EverMore, TripMate, EarthMate, TNTC, Zodiac, and RTCM104 drivers (if only because they don't configure any device setting). The SiRF driver now restores NMEA when necessary. It also restores some (but not all) of the things it tweaks in binary mode -- at the moment, just the Navigation Parameters from message 0x13. With more work, we should be able to do a full revert. The TSIP driver changes its per-cycle sentence inventory and thus needs some state-restore logic. This can be done; the same packet 0x35 we use to configure it can be sent in a no-argument mode to query the current sentence mix for later restore. The FV18 changes its per-cycle sentence inventory to include GSAs. It is possible to query that inventory, though we don't have code to do it yet. Garmin devices are a mess. We reconfigure those heavily, and we don't know if there's any way to capture their configuration state before we do it. The iTrax02 driver sets SYNCMODE to start navigation messages without checking to see if it's already on, and stops navigation methods on wrapup. It also forces the set of sentences issued. There doesn't seem to be any way to query these settings. *** Merge cgps and xgps Possibly cgps and xgps should merge into a single test client that honors the GPSD_UNITS environment variable and chooses its UI mode depending on whether or not it's running under X. There is controversy about this proposal on the dev list. *** Industry-standard format dumping of raw satellite data It would be useful to be able to extract RINEX (or some other standard) format data from any GPS device that can report pseudoranges etc. This belongs in the daemon because the device drivers are already doing the packet-cracking needed to get the data off the chips. Several commodity chipsets (ANTARIS, iTrax3, SiRF and Trimble) readily output enough data to make this a chore, rather than a hard problem. It has been suggested one way to do this is to have a generic structure in memory and corresponding output message with clock, doppler carrier phase and pseudoranges. This message is then reformatted by a client program. There are numerous formats for this information, and it would be easier to adapt to new formats if the formatting and use was handled by something other than the gpsd daemon. Currently the RT-IGS format is looking like the favorite for implementation; it's a fairly lightweight protocol, flexible enough to handle all the quantities required, and it is actually in use in production reference networks. RT-IGS is also a packet-oriented format, rather than a file-oriented format like RINEX. *** RTCM3 support. Previous plans for more RTCM2 support seem to have been overtaken by events, e.g. the world moving to RTCM3. We have support for analyzing RTCM3 messages, but it's entirely theoretical - written from the standard. We need to find a pair of files consisting of a representative set of RTCM3 sentences and some sort of ASCII dump of thgem so we can test whether our analyzer gets all the bitfield boundaries right. *** Do the research to figure out just what is going on with status bits NMEA actually has *four* kinds of validity bits: Mode, Status, the Active/Void bit (some sources interpret 'V' as 'Navigation receiver warning'), and in later versions the FAA indicator mode. Sentences that have an Active/Void send V when there is no fix, so the position data is no good. Let's look at which sentences send what: GPRMC GPGLL GPGGA GPGSA Returns fix Yes Yes Yes No Returns status No Yes Yes No Returns mode No No No Yes Returns A/V Yes Yes No No In addition, some sentences use empty fields to signify invalid data. My first conclusion from looking at this table is that the designers of NMEA 0183 should be hung for galloping incompetence. But never mind that. What are we to make of this mess? The fact that the FV18 sends GPRMC/GPGLL/GPGGA but not GPGSA argues that GPGSA is optional. I don't see how it can be, since it seems to be the only status bit that applies to altitude. Just how are we supposed to know when altitude is valid if it doesn't ship GSA? Can a receiver ever ship a non-empty but invalid altitude? Which of these override which other bits? I don't think status is ever nonzero when mode is zero. So status overrides mode. What other such relationships are there? News flash: it develops that the "Navigation receiver warning" is supposed to indicate a valid fix that has a DOP too high or fails an elevation test. *** IPv6 Support gpsd should have support for IPv6. Steps to get to full IPv6 support include: **** Detect IPv6 support and getaddrinfo(3) in configure.ac This web page may be helpful, but is probably overkill - the world has gotten simper since then: http://cvs.deepspace6.net/view/example-ipv6-package/configure.ac?rev=1.2&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup **** Change from one listening socket to N Having multiple sockets will also support future changes to listen on specific addresses, rather than the -G option for INADDR_ANY instead of INADDR_LOCAL. **** If v6 support is present, open both AF_INET and AF_INET6. If either fails, just skip it. gpsd should run on systems without "options INET" but with only "options INET6" (BSD) or the Linux equivalent. **** In libgps, if getaddrinfo is present, use it instead of gethostbyname. Loop through all the returned addresses until one works. See telnet in NetBSD for an example (src/usr.bin/telnet/commands.c). **** (perhaps) Add a flag to connection libraries to force v4 or v6. Also add command line flags to force the library flags. Perhaps this is not necessary; telnet and ntp have this feature but postfix and sendmail don't seem to. ** Future features (?) *** Support for more survey / professional / up-scale receivers. Devices such as the Javad JNSCore, Hemisphere Crescent, Septentrio AsteRx and PolaRx, NovAtel Superstar2 and OEMV, Thales (Magellan Professional) AC12 and DG14 would all be welcome. Of course, these are not $50 usb mice... *** Audio cues in the client when the fix status changes Calum writes: >Is it possible to add functionality (with a switch to enable it to >avoid annoying those that don't want it) so that beeps indicate NO >FIX, FIX, and OFFLINE status changes? > >For example - I run cgps and my laptop battery doesn't always supply >my PS2 port-powered GPS device with enough power, and it goes into >OFFLINE mode. As I can't drive, and check my laptop all the time, if >it emitted 5 1 second beeps when it went OFFLINE, it would be a handy alert. > >Similarly, a PCMCIA "eject" 2 beeps for NO FIX, and a PCMCIA "happy" 2 >beeps when it gets a fix again? > >Or something like that. This is a good idea for supporting hands-free operation, e.g. while driving. It would be an easy first project for somebody who wants to get into the client code. *** Set the system time zone from latitude/longitude If we're going to give gpsd the capability to set system time via ntpd, why not let it set timezone as well? A good thing for hackers travelling with laptops! The major issue here is that I have not yet found code, or a database, that would allow mapping from lon/lat to timezone. And the rules change from year to year. Actually this should be built as a specialized client, as some people won't want it. From : The timezone under Linux is set by a symbolic link from /etc/localtime[1] to a file in the /usr/share/zoneinfo[2] directory that corresponds with what timezone you are in. For example, since I'm in South Australia, /etc/localtime is a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/South. To set this link, type: ln -sf ../usr/share/zoneinfo/your/zone /etc/localtime Replace your/zone with something like Australia/NSW or Australia/Perth. Have a look in the directories under /usr/share/zoneinfo to see what timezones are available. [1] This assumes that /usr/share/zoneinfo is linked to /etc/localtime as it is under Red Hat Linux. [2] On older systems, you'll find that /usr/lib/zoneinfo is used instead of /usr/share/zoneinfo. Changing the hardlink will, of course, update the system timezone for all users. If I were designing this feature, I'd ensure that the system timezone can be overridden by a user-set TZ, but I don't know if it actually works that way. If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, this functionality is actually embedded in the GCC library version of tzset(), so the same method will work on any system that uses that. Problem: system daemons use the timezone set when they start up. You can't get them to grok a new one short of rebooting. Sources: Sources for Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm Free time-zone maps of the U.S. http://www.manifold.net/download/freemaps.html Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" end: