Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] PyBOMBS: First impressions and optional dependencies

[Tom Rondeau]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Alexandru Csete <address@hidden> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Yesterday, I started playing with pybombs and fixed a few recipes
> related to gr-osmosdr. During this process I made gr-osmosdr depend on
> uhd, rtl-sdr, osmo-sdr, hackrf and gr-iqbal. I did this to ensure that
> all supported input devices are made available to users. It should be
> noted that all these packages are optional and gr-osmosdr would work
> just fine with gnuradio as the only dependency still supporting
> funcube dongles and I/Q file sources.

Alex,

Thanks for the report and all of the patches you submitted to PyBOMBS.
It's a new project and will definitely need wide-spread testing and
help to get working well on various systems and for various needs.

> Later I will be adding a recipe for the gr-fcdproplus OOT source block
> and add that as a gr-osmosdr dependency as well. This works well for
> now since all these driver libraries are recent and well maintained.
> However, as time goes this driver list will grow and the risk of
> something breaking will increase. This made me think whether there may
> be a need for a weaker dependency specification, something like the
> "recommends" section in deb packages or the "variant" in macports?

The 'recommends' is a very interesting idea. I'm not sure I like
forcing the installation of all of the base drivers for gr-osmosdr,
but if we have a menu-driven section if the dependencies are
recommended and allow the user to select which, if any, to also
install, that'd be great.

Would you open a feature issue on the PyBOMBS Redmine page suggesting this?

> As an alternate solution here & now, we could just remove all optional
> dependencies from the gr-osmosdr recipe and instruct users to install
> their preferred driver libraries prior to installing gr-osmosdr. Or
> create meta-recipes that would provide the most common combinations. I
> don't know what would be the best solution.

I'm not sure, either. Until we figure out a concept like the
recommendations, my preference is to not include them as dependencies,
but I could be persuaded out of that thought. I'm guessing Philip
would argue for a meta-layer :)

> Otherwise I found pybombs to be very easy to use and provide
> sufficient flexibility for me to replace my own "build-gnuradio"
> scripts for managing multiple installations of gnuradio.
>
> Alex

Thanks again!

Tom