Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Introduction for GSoC participation

[Martin Braun]

On 02/26/2018 06:53 AM, swapnil negi wrote:
> Hi,
> I am Swapnil Negi, an Electronics and Communication undergraduate at
> Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. I am highly interested in
> contributing towards GNU Radio as my GSoC project. 
> [...]
> I have checked out the ideas list. Two of the ideas suit me:
> 1. CtrlPort backend implementation: I, myself faced issues with the
> thrift version so I really wish to improvise this. I have started
> reading about remote procedural calls, message queues, etc, the
> differences and benefits of different message queues like level of
> abstraction, ease of implementation, etc. It seems interesting to me.

Hi Swapnil,

very welcome to this list, and we do appreciate people getting to know
the community before applying.

We recently talked about some changes to ctrlport, and the end result is
that we need to think about that part a bit more. So unless you already
have a specific project in mind, I would recommend you focus on your
second idea...

> 2. gr-modtool overhaul: I haven't gone through the code structure of
> gr-modtool but the concept is really interesting. It will also help me
> get the real feeling of GNU Radio. I saw the present series of if's and
> else's and would like to work on improvising this. 

...and I'm very glad you immediately identified the biggest issue with
modtool. Nicolas already gave you some really good responses, so I'll
try and not repeat them.

FYI, I wrote modtool a long time ago and thus can attest that it hasn't
aged well. It's not easy to extend, it's a long set of statically
checked rules, etc.

If you're interested in improving this tool, I would recommend starting
to play around with it and see which shortcomings it has. For a start,
I'm pretty sure it doesn't work with Python 3 (that's actually on the
ideas list too, but it's an easy place to start).

As a side note, we're always *extremely* happy when GSoC students
volunteer to work on tooling and/or GUIs.

Cheers,
Martin