Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Release Announcement: GNU Radio 4.1

[Gerry Creager - NOAA Affiliate]

It's just not fair to keep reminding me that today's 1 APR. It's been too busy to sort out the cruft from the rest of it all.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Marcus D. Leech <address@hidden> wrote:

On 04/01/2015 03:30 PM, Martin Braun wrote:

Hey everyone,

as you might have heard, a GNU Radio hackfest is going on in sunny California, and one thing we've gotten going is the 4.1 release for GNU Radio. As you can tell, this is a major version jump.

Here's a release summary:

*Move to .NET*: This is probably the biggest change for now. Because of our continuing troubles with SWIG, we decided to move to a different platform for interoperating between a high-performance language and an easy scripting language, and .NET serves this cause. So, anything previously written in C++ is now in C#, and for the simple stuff (previously Python blocks) we now use ASP.NET. This is also fantastic as it finally allows graphical development using Visual Basic.

This also allowed us to modify the block API. The downside is, all OOT modules will be incompatible with GR4 -- maybe gr_modtool will provide conversion utilities once it has been ported to Delphi.

Linux support is currently not available -- this is not ideal, but we figured the 3.x series had broken Windows support for a long time, so this simply moves the problem to a different operating system. Unfortunately, we can't provide liveSDR ISOs anymore, now, because of licensing issues. As soon as mono picks up the slack, we'll be able to port GNU Radio 4 to Mono and Linux support will be mostly back on track.

*Embedded Support*: As a result of the embedded Linux conference the week prior to the hackfest, we realized that this whole 'embedded' thing is just a fad and is eating up our development resources. We are thus dropping embedded platform support for now, although we might revisit this when embedded Windows becomes more popular.

*GNU Radio Companion:* To overcome the lack of volunteers developing GRC, we will be integrating our graphical development process into the .NET framework also. As mentioned before, Visual Basic is ideally suited for the development of graphical widgets and we're anticipating a surge in new graphical widgets from the community.

On the community side, there'll be a couple of changes, too: Some already guessed we'd be dropping the mailing list as a communications platform when we announced our endorsement of Stack Overflow. The mailing list will go down as soon as we have a new web-based forum available, where users can post images inline as well as use Emojis. To avoid excessive trolling, users will either need a Facebook or Paypal account to log in.

Thanks everyone for being part of this community and keeping it going!
Of course, all the new stuff can be found on the 4.1 release website:

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Release4

Cheers,
Martin

You know, there's a tradition about April 1, that jokes played after 13:00 local cause bad kharma to flow to the joker.   Just, you know, sayin'.

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Gerry Creager

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“Big whorls have little whorls,

That feed on their velocity; 

And little whorls have lesser whorls, 

And so on to viscosity.” 

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