While working on the Debian packages of navit I stumbled upon gypsy, as the libgypsy is used by navit to listen to notifications about location changes via D-Bus.

As maintainer of the gpsd package I started to wonder what the opinion of the gpsd developers about gypsy is - especially after reading that "Gypsy was designed to fix the numerous design flaws found in GPSD". Well, here is their answer, which I support fully.

I'm blogging about it as I think it is important to know about this details if you plan to do something useful with a gps device, for example on mobile phones like the OpenMoko Freerunner. gpsd works very well on embedded devices, and if there's a feature missing just contact the developers. They're very responsive and like to implement useful features, if they can get a spec to do so (and even better, the hardware to test it). So I'm really wondering if it wouldn't make sense to replace the minimal NMEA/UBX implementation in the FSO Framework Daemon by gpsd, even if that means to compile code instead of writing Python code, which is much faster for rapid prototyping, of course.

Design flaws
The "no malloc" policy is a bit of a curious design decision. Just like "don't use cars, they're too fast and you can kill yourself in an accident".
Comment by Anonymous