On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 10:12 AM, Marcus Leech <mle...@ripnet.com> wrote:
> 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. > And I agree that it /should/ be easy. But the thing is, I think that it /is/ easy. However... One issue is that the project has evolved a lot over its lifetime and a lot even in the past year. So that means that a) there's a lot of bad information out there about working with older releases and b) people want the latest and greatest. So they try one thing, and it only gives them an older version, like 3.6, so they want to update. Without properly removing everything from their system, they try and build from scratch or use on of the build tools Marcus mention, which then causes conflicts. Many of the installation questions are really related to Linux and it just happens to be GNU Radio that's causing them to run into these OS problems. Tom > > on May 27, 2014, *Mike Harpe* <m...@mikeharpe.com> 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 > >
_______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
