On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Tom Rondeau <trondeau1...@gmail.com> wrote: > The other week, I made a post on my webpage about people not using GNU Radio > enough, which sparked off quite an interesting debate on the mailing list. > Just the other day, I went and pushed out some simple examples using the UHD > interface in GNU Radio. This, too, caused some discussion. And the two are > not unrelated. > As has been pointed out by a number of people, myself included (many times), > is that GNU Radio is a very challenging project both in its scope and its > usage. It's it not an end product, but a development platform to build some > very complex systems. Communications is not an easy subject, and mixing RF, > comms theory, information theory, computer science, and raw programming > together is a very special skill set. But despite me thinking not enough > people are using it, a ton of people ARE using GNU Radio (my real point was > that I see many situations where others could have benefited from using our > project instead of rolling their own), so it definitely has a good base of > users. What I'm now seeing, and this where the recent UHD apps comes in, is > that there we really have a lack of developers. > One thing that I keep hearing is feature requests. Some of these are small. > A consistent coding style is one of them. More apps and examples. > Better/more documentation. These are all on my todo list, and the other hard > working GNU Radio developers are doing their best to help out and move the > project forward (we've all see what Josh is capable of doing when he's > pulling one of his 25 hour days). But there is so much more to do! It was > great to get feedback immediately for my UHD examples in GNU Radio. That > just tells me there was a hole that needed filling. Some of them were bug > reports, which is fine. Instead of bug reports, though, I want to see bug > fixes. This could come in the form of a patch or even a Git branch somewhere > else (I use Github for all of my branch development work; > see http://gnuradio.squarespace.com/blog/2010/10/29/using-git-with-github-for-developing.html). > What it seems to come down to is a lack of initiative. We are all willing to > wait until someone else does something for us, and then report on the > problems. But it's hard to start something and push it out there. First, you > expose yourself to criticism and bug reports. You might feel uncomfortable > about your code. Don't. Don't worry about those things. We the community as > a whole will be much more grateful for your efforts in making the project > better than insulting you for mistakes or "ugly" code. We can work on minor > issues like that. Especially if everyone is helping. > There are two things that I want everyone to consider helping with. First, > look at my post on using Github (and use whatever Git-supported service you > prefer) to help develop, add features, and fix bugs in branches. I can then > pull them into the master branch easily. Second, I have started to build a > Coding Guide on our GNU Radio Wiki > (http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/Coding_guide). It's very basic > right now, but we can pull in the text that is in README.hacking, too. I > find, and I think others do as well, that getting information in the form of > a webpage is preferable to a text file. We can use this space to iterate and > evolve our style, and then hopefully (over time) backtrack and improve the > existing code that we find lacking. > If we can get your help for stuff big and small, I really think we can start > to see us making the project even better than it is now. > Thanks for your time, > Tom > _______________________________________________ > Discuss-gnuradio mailing list > Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio > >
I have a minor comment for anyone planning on using github. It has what could be a potentially cool feature called a "Network view" where you can look at what every one is doing on their various branches. However, it only works if everyone creates their repositories by forking from one another. I would suggest then that anyone who wants to create a new github repo do it by forking Tom's repository. _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
