[Discuss-gnuradio] PyBOMBS Update

[Martin Braun]

Everyone,

a couple of notes on PyBOMBS: First, GSoC participant Ravi Sharan will
be part of PyBOMBS development over the next weeks (see his announcement
and blog). Expect some cool features coming! If you want to see what
else we've planned, check out the issue tracker on github.

But, right now, there's a couple of new things I'd like to talk about.
There's been a lot of merges into PyBOMBS, and I'll be tagging a 2.1.0
release pretty soon. Since the last release, we've had some cool new
features:

- Macports and pacman support (we're still working on the recipes though)
- pybombs recipes allows updating all remote recipe repos and listing them
- Some recipe features: Satisfiers can be set to 'True' to skip them
(this way, we can keep alsa as a dependency for GNU Radio, but skip it
on Macs), 'make' can be run interactively (e.g. for the niusrprio
installer).
- Prefixes can be set up through recipes (more on that later)

Also, there's a ton of bugfixes. Probably, there were also new bugs, but
we're getting a lot of testing (thanks to everyone for this!) and as
such I think we're doing fairly well on the bug front. Still, given the
large amount of changes, I would like to give the codebase some time to
settle before making a release (but not too much, so Ravi's stuff can go
onto the next release).

*Prefix Recipes*:

Personally, I think this is a really cool feature, and it's something
that exists in different forms for other build tools, especially in the
embedded world. In a nutshell, it's an instruction to set up a full
prefix, including all config settings and packages.

There's already an example in gr-recipes. If you run the following command:

$ pybombs prefix init /path/to/prefix -R gnuradio-default

it will create a new prefix, then configure it and then install
gnuradio, gr-osmosdr and all dependencies in there. System-level
dependencies (such as Boost, CMake etc.) are still installed in the
system with this particular recipe, but you can write other recipes to
avoid that.

If you want to try the command above, you will need to update both the
PyBOMBS code *and* the recipes:

$ [sudo] pip install [--upgrade] git+https://github.com/gnuradio/pybombs.git
$ pybombs recipes update

We'll be providing more prefix-recipes coming soon.

Cheers,
Martin