The topic of "what kinds of questions go on gnuradio-discuss" has come up a couple of times over the last
few weeks, and we've had a lot of fresh subscriptions over the same period (I get all the subscribe / unsub notices), so I'll take this opportunity to quickly answer the question. What Marcus and Albin have said are both correct, but I want to clarify things for anyone new =)
It is our intention that users feel welcome and free to post any question related to GNU Radio usage to this list. SDR is a tremendously complex technology, and involves everything from electronics manufacturing to web development. There is no such thing as a person that is an expert in all of these things, and we can't and don't expect users to necessarily have the expertise to know exactly where a problem lies.
At the same time, we do expect people asking for help to be willing to spend the necessary time to debug their issue, and respect guidance given on-list when referrals are made to non-GNU Radio tutorials (e.g., a programming language or communications theory).
It really is quite common for, say, a signal processing engineer who is an expert algorithm developer to try to build something in GNU Radio, only to discover that they need to use Linux and they have no idea what that means. They might very well ask a basic question on this list, as from their perspective, they just want to use GNU Radio. That's fine. It's also fine for someone to respond to them and point them to a Linux tutorial (kindly). And if someone feels especially generous and wants to tutor them through the process, that's great! It's better done off-list, though.
When referring someone to non-GNU Radio material, please do it in a way that is actually useful. If someone is trying to figure out how to build something from source, saying, "Here's a book on computer science." is not terribly useful. Sending them to a tutorial on compiling software in Linux would be, though.
I
keep meaning to add this to the wiki and just haven't gotten to it. We
actually had a page on the old Redmine site about the sorts of advice
you can get on-list, etc., but it got lost in the move. That said, even the old page wasn't as complete as it ought to be. We answer enough of these questions that it's probably worthwhile having a list of useful tutorials for various topics that we can recommend.
As always, everyone on this list should be treated with respect and kindness. If you get frustrated by a question or discussion, simply don't respond, and if you think something steps over the line, please refer it to me or Martin.
Cheers,
Ben