[Discuss-gnuradio] [PyBOMBS] Need your help!

[Martin Braun]

Hi everyone,

there's been a lot of movement on PyBOMBS since the 2.0.1 release, and
I'd like to release 2.1.0 soon. However, there's a bunch of problems
that need resolving first, and I'm running out of ideas to find and
reproduce them.

My prime test case is the following pybombs command:

$ pybombs prefix init ~/path/to/prefix -R gnuradio-default

(Note you will need the most current PyBOMBS and gr-recipes to run this).

Going forward, this should become the default way to install GNU Radio.
It will create a prefix in ~/path/to/prefix, and then install GNU Radio,
gr-osmosdr and a whole bunch of dependencies. (Note this will take some
time and occupy over 5 Gigabytes once complete). It will also install
system-wide dependencies (e.g. Boost, CMake, SWIG) if necessary.

However, it sometimes fails. I would like to get this build step super
robust on most popular distros/OSes. Here's the things I've run into:

- Python3/2 issues. I *think* they're mostly resolved. Any errors
referring to encoding are most likely due to incomplete 2/3
compatibility code, though.
- thrift failing to build. I think this is an issue with libtool and/or
pkg-config versions. We recently reverted a change to minimum pkg-config
versions, because I wasn't happy with every single prefix having to run
their own version of those tools. Anyhow, thrift is flagged 'optional'
in this command. But I'd like to know exactly what is required for
thrift to build correctly.
- libosmo-dsp sometimes fails with an error during ./configure. Then
again, sometimes it doesn't. I'm currently baffled by this one.


So, anyone reading this -- please run this command and see if/how it
fails for you (hopefully, it doesn't). I just ran it on my 14.04 system
and it worked fine; but I've also run it on other 14.04 systems and seen
it fail.

Thanks!

Martin