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

[Ben Reynwar]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Tom Rondeau <address@hidden> wrote:
> The other week, I made a post on my webpage about people not using GNU Radio
> enough, which sparked off quite an interesting debate on the mailing list.
> Just the other day, I went and pushed out some simple examples using the UHD
> interface in GNU Radio. This, too, caused some discussion. And the two are
> not unrelated.
> As has been pointed out by a number of people, myself included (many times),
> is that GNU Radio is a very challenging project both in its scope and its
> usage. It's it not an end product, but a development platform to build some
> very complex systems. Communications is not an easy subject, and mixing RF,
> comms theory, information theory, computer science, and raw programming
> together is a very special skill set. But despite me thinking not enough
> people are using it, a ton of people ARE using GNU Radio (my real point was
> that I see many situations where others could have benefited from using our
> project instead of rolling their own), so it definitely has a good base of
> users. What I'm now seeing, and this where the recent UHD apps comes in, is
> that there we really have a lack of developers.
> One thing that I keep hearing is feature requests. Some of these are small.
> A consistent coding style is one of them. More apps and examples.
> Better/more documentation. These are all on my todo list, and the other hard
> working GNU Radio developers are doing their best to help out and move the
> project forward (we've all see what Josh is capable of doing when he's
> pulling one of his 25 hour days). But there is so much more to do! It was
> great to get feedback immediately for my UHD examples in GNU Radio. That
> just tells me there was a hole that needed filling. Some of them were bug
> reports, which is fine. Instead of bug reports, though, I want to see bug
> fixes. This could come in the form of a patch or even a Git branch somewhere
> else (I use Github for all of my branch development work;
> see 
> http://gnuradio.squarespace.com/blog/2010/10/29/using-git-with-github-for-developing.html).
> 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.
> There are two things that I want everyone to consider helping with. First,
> look at my post on using Github (and use whatever Git-supported service you
> prefer) to help develop, add features, and fix bugs in branches. I can then
> pull them into the master branch easily. Second, I have started to build a
> Coding Guide on our GNU Radio Wiki
> (http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/Coding_guide). It's very basic
> right now, but we can pull in the text that is in README.hacking, too. I
> find, and I think others do as well, that getting information in the form of
> a webpage is preferable to a text file. We can use this space to iterate and
> evolve our style, and then hopefully (over time) backtrack and improve the
> existing code that we find lacking.
> If we can get your help for stuff big and small, I really think we can start
> to see us making the project even better than it is now.
> Thanks for your time,
> Tom
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>
>

I have a minor comment for anyone planning on using github.  It has
what could be a potentially cool feature called a "Network view" where
you can look at what every one is doing on their various branches.
However, it only works if everyone creates their repositories by
forking from one another.  I would suggest then that anyone who wants
to create a new github repo do it by forking Tom's repository.