[Discuss-gnuradio] PyBOMBS: First impressions and optional dependencies

[Alexandru Csete]

Greetings,

Yesterday, I started playing with pybombs and fixed a few recipes
related to gr-osmosdr. During this process I made gr-osmosdr depend on
uhd, rtl-sdr, osmo-sdr, hackrf and gr-iqbal. I did this to ensure that
all supported input devices are made available to users. It should be
noted that all these packages are optional and gr-osmosdr would work
just fine with gnuradio as the only dependency still supporting
funcube dongles and I/Q file sources.

Later I will be adding a recipe for the gr-fcdproplus OOT source block
and add that as a gr-osmosdr dependency as well. This works well for
now since all these driver libraries are recent and well maintained.
However, as time goes this driver list will grow and the risk of
something breaking will increase. This made me think whether there may
be a need for a weaker dependency specification, something like the
"recommends" section in deb packages or the "variant" in macports?

As an alternate solution here & now, we could just remove all optional
dependencies from the gr-osmosdr recipe and instruct users to install
their preferred driver libraries prior to installing gr-osmosdr. Or
create meta-recipes that would provide the most common combinations. I
don't know what would be the best solution.

Otherwise I found pybombs to be very easy to use and provide
sufficient flexibility for me to replace my own "build-gnuradio"
scripts for managing multiple installations of gnuradio.

Alex