[Discuss-gnuradio] PMT renaming

[Tom Rondeau]

Hi all,

I wanted to let everyone know about some changes being made to the PMT library. We've been using PMTs more and more for things like stream tags, message passing, and the metadata files.

The changes only apply to the 'next' branch since it would break anything using PMTs on 3.6. We figured as long as we're making so many API changes for 3.7, this might as well be one of them. I'll be merging this branch as soon after I send this email. So if you are using PMTs and keeping track of 'next', you'll have to update your code appropriately.

Specifically, we want to update the PMT naming scheme. We use the namespace 'pmt' in C++ and the module name 'pmt' in Python, but the PMT functions were all prefixed with 'pmt_' as well. So we would have 'pmt::pmt_xxx' in C++ and 'pmt.pmt_xxx' in Python. The redundancy in the names was counterproductive. We have renamed all of the PMT functions to remove the prefix 'pmt_' and now rely on the namespace/module names at the identifier. So this is really a very mechanical change.

As part of the naming move, we also removed the installed PMT module

from GRUEL. While before we used 'from gruel import pmt', we now just

use 'import pmt'. The change is due to a couple of factors. First, in

the QA code and any in-tree usage of PMTs, we always used the `import

pmt' format, which lead to confusion and work-arounds. Secondly, we

might be getting rid of GRUEL and make PMT its own component and

library, so this change would come from that, anyways.

Tom