New release of Themyscira gsm-codec-lib

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hello GSM FOSS community,

I am pleased to announce the new release of Themyscira Wireless GSM
codec libraries and utilities package:

https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/codecs/gsm-codec-lib-r3.tar.bz2
https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/codecs/gsm-codec-lib-latest.tar.bz2
(symlink)

The principal changes from the previous release (a year ago) are:

* Libgsmfrp has been replaced with libgsmfr2, a major version change
  per SemVer.

* The former dependency on historical libgsm has been eliminated; the
  functionality of libgsm (GSM 06.10 encoder and decoder implementation)
  has been absorbed into libgsmfr2.

* Libgsmefr version 1.1.0 exhibits approximately 2x performance
  improvement over the original version.

* New library added: libtwamr for 3GPP AMR-NB codec, serving as a
  replacement for libopencore-amrnb in Themyscira GSM codec
  exploration workflows.

* Some updates to the included utilities, see documentation inside.

* The configuration and build process has been revamped: the full suite
  of libraries and utilities can now be installed in any desired file
  system location without contortions.

The last change (new configuration, build and install system) is
particularly worthy of note: it is the beginning of a formal split
between FreeCalypso and Themyscira software realms.  As I explained in
my previous post on this topic, FC and ThemWi sw components function
in very different realms: for FC, it is the realm of an end user of
GSM phones, or that of a hardware lab hacker tinkering with GSM MS
development boards, SIM programming and sniffing tools etc; for ThemWi
sw components the relevant realm is that of server machines running
processes that function as GSM network elements.  The practical
significance for sw configuration management is that the peculiarity
of fixed install location that came about historically in FC software
realm (/opt/freecalypso) does NOT need to carry over into ThemWi sw
realm.

Beginning with the present release of gsm-codec-lib, all ThemWi sw
components will have a ./configure script that needs to be run before
'make'.  These ThemWi configure scripts are and will continue to be
hand-coded, not generated with autoconf/automake, but they still
function to the same standard and accept the same standard options for
controlling installation paths.  The default prefix is /usr/local,
following general FOSS community standard, but I imagine that most
distro packagers will probably set it to /usr as appears to be the
convention in that world.  In my own usage I continue to use various
directory trees under /opt, but this aspect of my own usage is no
longer imposed on anyone else, at least on ThemWi software side.

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
Mychaela aka The Mother