Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio distribution and build from source.

[Marcus Leech]

Ideally, end-users should never have to build from source--their distrib-of-choice should simply have the latest Gnu Radio release in

  their repositories.  The reality, however, is much different.  The Gnu Radio project has *very little* influence over the policy and

  decisions with respect to which versions are carried in the repos for which Linux distributions.

 

So, there are two "easy build from source" options:

 

  o build-gnuradio

  o pybombs

 

But, well, here's the thing.  There's no such thing as "The Linux Operating System".  Instead there are a couple of dozen different

 distribs each with their own way of doing things.   Both "pybombs" and "build-gnuradio" try to encapsulate those differences for

 *some* of the "top" distributions "out there", but can't possibly cover all of them--not without serious amounts of maint activity,

  which means many, many, many person-hours of dedicated time.  We all do this for free, in our spare time.

 

Gnu Radio, like many modern pieces of software has a metric tonne of dependencies.  This is pretty normal.  The only way to

  get away from that is to have the user population agree to a sudden and massive loss in functionality, and a release schedule

  that is measured in decades, as the Gnu Radio crew try to re-build all that functionality from "bare metal".  Modern software

  does a *lot* of "standing on the shoulders of giants".  That isn't ever likely to change.   When you install from the "packages"

  offered by your favourite distrib, all of that pain has been undertaken by the packagers, so all you have to do is "install".

  But you may end up with older Gnu Radio--sometimes, *much* older.

 

Gnu Radio uses modern build tools, like Cmake, which actually do a *LOT* of work to configure things so that the source builds.

  Sometimes, on some systems, that doesn't always work right.  Remember the *massive* diversity-of-Linux thing I talked about

  above?  Well, the folks who write our Cmake files cannot, as a matter of practicality, always get it right for every version of

  every Linux disttribution out there, so, bug reports come in from the field, and the Cmake files become, over time, more

  "encompassing".

 

So, short of the Gnu Radio project inventing their own, yet-another-build-system, and ditching all the dependencies and writing

  from "bare metal", I'm not sure that the path forward would be any different than what we have now.

 

 

 

on May 27, 2014, Mike Harpe <address@hidden> wrote:

I think the distribution and build system needs some improvement.

I say that because a disproportionate amount of traffic on this list seems to pertain to building the software from source. It shouldn't be this hard given the tools that are available.

 

Mike Harpe, N4PLE

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