Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] A few words on development

[Martin Braun]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 07:51:00PM -0400, Marcus D. Leech wrote:
>     What it seems to come down to is a lack of initiative. We are all willing
>     to wait until someone else does something for us, and then report on the
>     problems. But it's hard to start something and push it out there. First,
>     you expose yourself to criticism and bug reports. You might feel
>     uncomfortable about your code. Don't. Don't worry about those things. We
>     the community as a whole will be much more grateful for your efforts in
>     making the project better than insulting you for mistakes or "ugly" code.
>     We can work on minor issues like that. Especially if everyone is helping.
> 
>     Thanks for your time,
> 
>     Tom
> 
> Having been a contributor of both new-content and bug-fixes and "sidecars"
> (like build-gnuradio), I can attest that the experience is very
>   rewarding.  I only regret that I can't spend more time on making Gnu Radio
> better.  Between my full-time job, and spending my
>   "spare" (ha!) time *using* Gnu Radio for actual applications work, I find I
> have less time for bug-fixing/contributing than I used to.
> 
> The Josh object is amazing, to be sure.  But even an energetic young
> whipper-snapper like Josh can't keep from burnout forever.
>   So, those of you who feel competent to contribute, and have been holding
> back, JUST DO IT :-)

I can agree on one thing in particular: I wish I had more time to work
on GNU Radio, it's a great project. Also, contributing stuff is better
than requesting things.

Still, I also believe the community thing can be improved for GNU Radio.
From my experiences, I can say that the process of contributing stuff is
quite opaque.

For the one-line bug-fixes, this seems not to be a problem. For bigger
contributions, things could be smoother.

First of all, how exactly does one contribute stuff? There's Tom's blog
entry on how to use github, there's the gnuradio-patch mailing list, and
theres the trac bugtracker. So what do I use? Do all major patches go
through Tom? But isn't he busy? By the way, the official GR website
seems to have a very outdated document on this topic
(http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/Development).

And what kind of stuff is accepted, anyway? How do I know that whatever
code I feel should be part of the GNU Radio core will be actually
merged?

The Coding Guide is a good step in the right direction. But let me
suggest some other things to smoothen the 'community integration':
- There could be another document with the definitive guide on how to
  contribute. Perhaps updating the previous link would be enough.
  Questions answered should include:
  * What kind of stuff is accepted into the core, what kind of stuff is
    better maintained as a separate CGRAN project? (Examples, refer to
    the mailing lists as a place to discuss this...)
  * The mechanics/protocol of actually submitting
  * What happens after submitting? 
- Revive the bug tracker.
- Explain who's who in GNU Radio (seriously, who's actually actively
  developing GR besides Tom? Are there areas of responsibility? Who may
  submit to the master?)
- Create a list of suggestions of contributions ("You want to
  contribute? How about you write a foo-agulator for standard bar? How
  about writing the docs for block `grep -R 'FIX MY DOCS' src/lib/`?")

This would be great.

MB

-- 
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Communications Engineering Lab (CEL)

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Braun
Research Associate

Kaiserstraße 12
Building 05.01
76131 Karlsruhe

Phone: +49 721 608-43790
Fax: +49 721 608-46071
www.cel.kit.edu

KIT -- University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and
National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association

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