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<meta name="Author" content="Eric S. Raymond">
<meta name="Description" content="GPSd is a utility that can listen to a GPS or AIS yreceiver and re-publish the positional data in a simpler format.">
<meta name="Keywords" content="GPS, gpsd, project history">
<meta name="Revised" content="9 April 2015">
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A Brief History of GPSD
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<p>There have been at least three forks of gpsd wandering around, all
of which are now defunct. This page will explain matters.</p>
<p>The gpsd project was started in 1995 by Remco Treffkorn, back when
GPS technology was a shiny new thing. Remco laid out a sound basic
framework for a utility that functioned without much fuss for nearly
a decade.</p>
<p>Remco's design may, in a sense, have been too good. Because gpsd
didn't cause problems or attract attention, the maintainers (including
Remco himself and Derrick Brashear) turned to other more pressing
problems. The code was neglected for years at a stretch, and became
rather dusty. The original architecture started to show signs of
strain when Remco, Derrick, and Russ Nelson bolted on support for the odd
proprietary format of the EarthMate GPS between early 1999 and late
2002.</p>
<p>Therafter, Russ Nelson hosted the project on <a
href='http://pygps.org/'>pygps.org</a> for several years and became
one of its three maintainers. He continued the gpsd tradition by
largely ignoring the code once he had gotten it working well enough to
support <a href="http://pygps.org">pyGPS</a>.</p>
<p>Sometime during this period Fritz Ganter, author of the <a
href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/gpsdrive/">GPSdrive</a> project,
forked gpsd. There are a couple of different stories about why the fork
happened and some clashing memories. However, the gpsdrive version did
not diverge from the parent gpsd in any significant way. The protocol it
spoke was a proper subset of gpsd-2's. This variant is also dead; the
new maintainer, Jörg Ostertag, dropped it from the gpsdrive-2.10
prereleases in 2007.</p>
<p>Another fork was ngpsd, part of the <code>NavSys</code> project.
This diverged from the gpsdrive fork in 2002. The author, Amaury
Jaqcquot, is now on the gpsd list and ngpsd has been officially
retired.</p>
<p>Yet another fork of gpsd was moved into C++ by Thomas Hargrove and
called <code>tgpsd</code>. The protocol it spoke was almost a proper
subset of that of gpsd, with PDAVMSQ commands and an 'I' command that
could query the azimuth/elevation/signal-strength of an individual
satellite. As of December 2006 the <code>tgpsd</code> project page has
dropped off the net.</p>
<p>Further forks of <code>gpsd</code> seem unlikely, as the project
has since become sufficiently large and visible to co-opt most
potential developers.</p>
<p>In August 2004, Eric Raymond (yes, <em><a
href='http://www.catb.org/~esr/'>that</a></em> Eric Raymond) tripped
over a minor problem with gpsd while playing with his new toy, a
BU-303 USB GPS. He looked at the code, muttered imprecations about
the thick layer of dust on it, and began hacking.</p>
<p>About a week of frenzied coding later, Eric had (a) completely
refactored and cleaned up the code, (b) added every feature then on
the developers' wishlists, (c) documented it all, and (d) added
substantial new features of his own, including the libgps service
library that allows C developers to manage a gpsd session in a
remote-procedure-call-like way (e.g., without having to worry about
gpsd's protocol or how to unpack its data into a C structure).</p>
<p>Eric's work became the prototype for gpsd-2.0. In mid-August of
2004, Eric moved the project to Berlios with the approval and
cooperation of all three of the 1.x maintainers. (The main reason
for that choice of hosting site was that it was among the first to
offer Subversion, which was new technology at the time and which
Eric and the 1.x developers were all interested in experimenting with.)</p>
<p>In early 2005 the project took another significant turn as Eric
implemented packet-sniffing and autobauding, threw out all the
old configuration options. and factored the daemon into a thin
multiplexer layer sitting on top of a set of device drivers. Support
for non-NMEA devices dates from this redesign; SiRF was the first.</p>
<p>In the year between June 2005 and June 2006 the <code>gpsd</code>
project went from being mostly a solo effort by Eric to attracting a
flourishing community of developers. Prominent among them are Chris
Kuethe and Gary Miller, who were given release authority in October
2006.</p>
<p>By the end of 2006, <code>gpsd</code> supported several vendor
binary protocols as well as the original NMEA and Zodiac. The suite
of GPS test tools had greatly expanded, and we implemented a rigorous
regression-test framework for the daemon itself. The daemon had
acquired new features like multi-device capability and hotplug
autoconfiguration.</p>
<p>The daemon's core code has been pretty stable since 2006. Adding
drivers for new vendor protocols is a routine process now; we've had
at least two contributed by people who aren't core GPSD developers.
In early 2009 Eric cleaned up and rewrote a lot of our test and
configuration tools; <code>gpsmon</code> dates from this time
(replacing and generalizing earlier <code>sirfmon</code>).</p>
<p>In 2007-2008 the GPSD project got its first new competition since
1.x days, a project called Gypsy positioned directly against what the
author believes to be our design mistakes. We discuss it <a
href="gypsy.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>In July and August 2009 ESR <a
href="protocol-evolution.html">redesigned the GPSD command
protocol</a> and gave <code>gpsd</code> the ability to read data from
marine AIS receivers and pass it to clients.</p>
<p>In January 2010, the GPSD project <a
href="http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Bad-Code-Offsets-Open-Web-Innovation">won</a>
the first Good Code Grant from the Alliance for Code Excellence.</p>
<p>In March 2010 the project changed version-control systems, moving
from Subversion to git. In April 2011, it changed build systems,
dumping autotools for scons.</p>
<p>In August 2011 we shipped the long-awaited 3.0 major release.
Following this, the codebase proved so mature that, when it was ported
by cross-development to a MIPS-based router in mid-September, no C
changes at all were required.</p>
<p>In late September 2011, the announcement that the Berlios forge site
would be shutting down at the end of 2011 forced the project to move
to Savannah.</p>
<p>In the 3.12 release of January 2015, the undocumented remnants of
client-library support for the pre-JSON query protocol were
removed.</p>
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