[Discuss-gnuradio] Project Announcement: "master" will require C++11 soon

[CEL]

Hello greatest SDR community to roam the earth,

as we're progressing towards a merge of the next branch into master,
which will actually bring us new features and challenges like Python3,
QT5, YAML instead of XML in GRC and many, many specific improvements,
I'll announce that we're switching over to mandatory C++11 on master.

This allows for a lot less verbose coding style in many places, and
gives us a whole load of language features that we formerly had to
import through Boost, which has the tendency to change API without
notice (we've been bitten by that, for example, in the shape of
random::mt19937, and other namespaces).

It was becoming "kind of a requirement, anyway" through cppunit, as
that switched to C++11 recently. Luckily, on machines with a "fresh
enough" cppunit to require C++11, we also were able to rely on a
compiler for that standard, and we figured out that for most systems,
getting a C++11 compiler means no extra effort.

Older systems will continue to be able to build the maint-3.7 branch,
which we still actively maintain and to which we add bugfixes.

Master will, in the closer future, look like next looks now, as we're
moving towards a 3.8 release. That will undoubtedly mean we'll have
quite a bit of application breakage with master. That is not
intentional, but might very well be inevitable, as the changes we're
making to the code base are quite fundamental, and thus we'll have to
understand master as what it was meant to be: the main development
branch. Releases from that branch are to be assumed "end-user
compatible", but not every intermediate state, at every cost. As said,
the upcoming release from master will be 3.8! 

Now, to get to that release, and we really *have* to, we'll need a
large set of good bug reports! So, whether you're working on next,
master or with the latest 3.7 release, and something doesn't work like
it should, please do file an issue with GNU Radio on github, and if
possible, make a test case; if you need help with any of that, please
do reach out!


Best regards,
Marcus