Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GRC Install - Pybombs vs Binaries

[Martin Braun]

On 12/19/2014 02:56 PM, John Meloche wrote:
> [...]
> forward.  At a training course from Corgan Labs in the spring we were
> warned that binaries will be phased out in favour of pybombs.
> This leads me to a few questions:
> 1) Will the binaries be available and supported into the future or will
> pybombs eventualy be the method of choice?

Not sure what exactly you discussed with Johnathan, but in general we
recommend people to use the binaries (apt-get install), unless you need
a newer version or want to particpate in development. In particular, for
beginners this is a good choice because it removes at least one awkward
stage of getting started.
Note that you should have at least a 3.7.x version. Latest Ubuntus ship
this. If this is not the case, that would be one case where we don't
recommend using binaries.

> 2) Is there an advantage to using one method over the other?

The obvious ones: apt-get is easier, pybombs gives you more flexibility
and newest stuff. The latter also has the advantage that you have
immediate access to lots of OOT modules.

> 3) Is there a way to identify a package version that is considered to
> be long term support compared to a minor bug fix (similar to the way
> that Ubuntu has identified its versions)?

We don't really have this. You can see some releases have four-figure
version numbers (e.g. 3.7.5.1) which is what happens when we add some
bugfixes to a release (in this case, 3.7.5). There's still too much
change going on with GNU Radio to freeze an LTS version of it.

Cheers,
M