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

[Alexandru Csete]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 4:27 PM, Tom Rondeau <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Alexandru Csete <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Alex,
>
> Thanks for the report and all of the patches you submitted to PyBOMBS.
> It's a new project and will definitely need wide-spread testing and
> help to get working well on various systems and for various needs.
>
>> 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?
>
> The 'recommends' is a very interesting idea. I'm not sure I like
> forcing the installation of all of the base drivers for gr-osmosdr,
> but if we have a menu-driven section if the dependencies are
> recommended and allow the user to select which, if any, to also
> install, that'd be great.
>
> Would you open a feature issue on the PyBOMBS Redmine page suggesting this?

Done.

>> 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.
>
> I'm not sure, either. Until we figure out a concept like the
> recommendations, my preference is to not include them as dependencies,
> but I could be persuaded out of that thought. I'm guessing Philip
> would argue for a meta-layer :)

Maybe as compromise we can remove all optional dependencies except
rtl-sdr and uhd. That would provide a good default for 95% of the
users today and only require rtl-sdr as extra package since the
gnuradio recipe already depends on uhd.

Alex