Talk:Draft-AN-445
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Please don't lead people down this path that don't have to
The default reaction to "how do I build GNU Radio" should be "do you really need to build it? Can you spell out why you need it?", as modern Linux distros bring modern GNU Radio and modern UHD.
I therefore would propose we keep this AN sweet and short – start with a warning that if the reader wants the modern versions listed on InstallingGR, then they should not even read this document any further.
I'd also point out that installing Linux should probably, for the documenting party's sake, be considered out of scope entirely. We can recommend some Linux distro, but Ettus certainly has no interest in supporting customers setting up their Linux! My sad experience with this is that you don't even start pointing out specific tools, or you're suddenly the support engineer for a bunch of angry defense contractor PMs.
We should also strike all the lists of dependencies to install; apt build-dep gnuradio uhd-host does the same, but stays up to date. (same exists for basically any other platform) If the distribution knowledge of build-time dependencies is wrong, we should work with upstream to fix that. Mait would like that.
Generally, any documentation that boils down to "copy these lines of code into your terminal and hit enter" should actually be a shell script that is well-commented. Taking this thought one step further, they should actually not just be shell scripts, but be the scripts run by a debian/ubuntu package. Every recipe that we can document well enough for it to be foolproof, proves that we can actually build these packages ourselves. We could be Ubuntu packaging off Josh's shoulders and offering Ubuntu package repos for:
- latest-release UHD builds and exactly the GNU Radio that Ubuntu ships built against that UHD, so that all things using GNU Radio but not GR directly stay compatible
- latest-release UHD builds and latest-release GNU Radio built against that UHD
- nightly UHD builds and latest-release GNU Radio built against that UHD
- nightly UHD builds and nightly GNU Radio built against that UHD
(more important to have 1., than to have 2., … from an Ettus point of view)
Ettus does have good PPAs for its current UHD releases, so no customer should have to build UHD themselves to code with UHD; and because we care about the GNU Radio-using customers as well, Ettus should be packaging GNU Radio built against these versions of UHD as well. That closes the gap where currently, when a user installs GNU Radio from Ubuntu, but then installs UHD from the Ettus PPA, they still have the old UHD used by their GNU Radio, but the images downloader, uhd_usrp_probe and so on are the modern UHD. That is not desirable in any way! The users don't know why they can't download the right packages, and why things break at every corner. No; installing (current situation) UHD 4.5.0.0 uhd-host and thus libuhd-4.5 from Ettus' PPA should uninstall the Ubuntu 20.04 libuhd-3.15, and thus uninstall the ubuntu version of gnuradio-3.8. Replacing that, it should install a compatible gnuradio-3.8 built against UHD 4.5.
UHD is the single most common reason Linux GNU Radio users (not developers) still build GNU Radio from source. GNU Radio has long left "a user needs to know how to build complex software such as UHD and GNU Radio from source" behind it. We should as well!
Marcus Müller, the (talk) 20:31, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
- Re: RFNoC: GNU Radio 3.10 comes with gr-uhd with direct RFNoC 4 support; we no longer need to document gr-ettus usage, as that's dead. yay! Even with RFNoC, a user of modern Ubuntu needs not build anything from source. Marcus Müller, the (talk) 20:35, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
From Barry Duggan
The Draft-AN-445 was patterned after the Ettus doc, but IMO, AN-445 should contain only the following sections:
- Dependencies for UHD
- Installing UHD from source code
- Configuring USB
- Configuring Ethernet
- Connect the USRP
- the brief description of "Building and installing GNU Radio from source code" in the Draft