Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] New structural change

[Martin Braun]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 03:41:13PM -0500, Tom Rondeau wrote:
> Hey list,
> 
> I'm working on merging Josh's gr_blocks branch into GNU Radio, and he's made a
> few structural changes to how things will be installed. I wanted to have a
> discussion to see what people felt about the changes. Note that this only
> affects the new stuff that's added (gr-blocks and gr-filter). However, we will
> be deprecating the old blocks that these replace and have them removed in one
> of the upcoming versions, so at that point, the new structure becomes
> important.

Hi Tom,

could you please give us a link to the relevant branch? Josh sends so
many git-URLs around, it's a bit hard to keep track :)

> If you look at any of the source files in gr-blocks, you'll see that he's made
> and started using namespaces a great deal more than before, and he's using
> another level of inheritance and abstraction to provide a different way of
> auto-generating blocks that do the same operation on different types (as
> opposed to the gengen work that uses Python to build code out of templates).
> This is all probably a good thing.
> 
> The differences, though, coming in the naming scheme and installation method.
> Instead of having a gr_<name>.h file installed into $prefix/include/gnuradio,
> it's just <name>.h that is installed into $prefix/include/gnuradio/blocks.
> Likewise, the headers in gr-filter are installed into 
> $prefix/include/gnuradio/
> filter.

As Michael said, this sounds like a good thing. Namespaces and proper file 
names in
combination with proper directory names is the way to go.

> Any thoughts? No response will be regarded as acceptance of the NCO (new code
> order) :)

Many, many cool things have been happening in the last couple of years.
However, the 3.x version branch has morphed incredibly since 3.0.

Perhaps, at some time when all the glitches have been figured out, and a
sensible structure and API have been developed, it would make sense to make a 
cut,
deprecate all the old stuff and call it GNU Radio 4.0.
Version 3.5 is already very different from 3.0, and every change in
structure/API doesn't really help people who actually want a stable
version of GNU Radio (although I belong to those who prefer an unstable
one with lots of new features :).

MB

-- 
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Communications Engineering Lab (CEL)

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Braun
Research Associate

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KIT -- University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and
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