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In Case You Missed It... v3.6.0 Release

I've been remiss in updating my blog with the latest 3.6.0 release of GNU Radio. This continues our efforts to constantly move forward and focus more on making sure updated, stable releases are available that people can rely on.

There were a number of updates that you can find on the changelog page in the above link to the release. The most important one is that, finally, our long national nightmare of hosting and supporting two build systems is at an end! We have remove the autotools build in favor of cmake. Not only have we worked hard enough to make sure cmake satisfied all of our build needs, but we really started focusing our energies there, often leaving behind the old autotools way of compiling the code. No longer. We have moved over to cmake. In most ways, this is a positive move. People familiar with cmake, I'm sure, love it. Those unfamiliar may have a bit of growing pains, but I think you'll soon find that as a user, it is very simple to work with. Our build guide shows you the steps to using it to build GNU Radio from scratch (hint: basically replace configure with cmake).

In another major advancement, GNU Radio users might have noticed that our website has been a bit slow and groggy. In a way, this was a really positive thing for the project because it meant that we receive a ton of traffic. It was, however, annoying and needed to be fixed. This past week, Johnathan Corgan and I updated the server machine to a faster system. The change in the responsiveness of the website was immediate, and I think all of our users will be pleased.

 

New Server, New Service

We have recently updated the GNU Radio server to a new platform with updated versions of all of our services. There were a few hiccups along the way as proxies and other caching sites had to be refreshed for everyone to get to the new site properly, but I haven't heard any complaints in a while, so hopefully those initial jitters have gone away.

Among the new versions of our software is an updated Redmine. The new Redmine fixes some issues we had with registration, but it will also allow us to support multiple projects and other nice features like that. Keep an eye out for expanding information on the website as we integrate these new features.

Mostly, I hope this change hasn't effected anyone, and it should only serve to make the website more stable and nicer to use. The new server in the background has already saved us a ton of work.

One new change that has come about is an update from running Hudson to Jeknins. This will serve as our new continuous integration tool and I hope to start making good use of it in our project development cycle.

Initially, the most important change is that every time Jenkins builds GNU Radio, on a weekly basis, the resulting packaged tarball for the most recent master development branch will be published on our website. This means that people who don't want to or can't use git to access the software can get a new snapshot of the code weekly. The links to the tarball and the SHA1 sum of the tarball are found on the Downloads page of gnuradio.org.

Jenkins Interface: http://gnuradio.org/jenkins/

Download Page: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Download