# CGRAN down indefinitely, but hopefully not for long (want feedback) **URL:** \ **Category:** GNU Radio\ **Created:** [September 29, 2014, 8:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277 "2014-09-29T20:02:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![addis\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/c4cdca/32.png) [@addis\_a](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/addis_a)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 8:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/1 "2014-09-29T20:02:15Z")
The machine that runs CGRAN down in some basement somewhere at Carnegie Mellon has hit some issues again. Given that I’m no longer at the university, these issues are becoming harder for me to address. At this point, it’s probably best for CGRAN to “move on” as we’ve all been in discussion about over time. What I can do if everyone still finds CGRAN useful is: 1. Provide a more reliable host and machine for it 2. Update it to be more useful to the community (e.g., more towards git) It still gets a lot of hits (~16,000 a month) and every time it goes down people hunt me down and ask when it’s coming back up. So it seems as though the community still uses it. I can update it with Pybombs or Gitlib or whatever people feel is appropriate. It can be more of a portal page even, without a repository if most people just use Github now anyway. Do people still like it is a standalone service, or is it better to just “roll it in” to the GNU Radio webpage somewhere now? I want to do whatever the community finds is most useful. Thanks! George ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 9:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/2 "2014-09-29T21:30:27Z")
CGRAN is useful and I’d like to see it live on in some form, at least as a directory of modules that people are developing. My gut feeling is that github is a good way forward. I’m not sure what kind of quality assertion you want to make by including something in CGRAN (clueful developers? decent module architecture? likely to be reusable? unlikely to be abandon-/gradstudent-ware…), but having a curated directory seems better than searching for “gnuradio” and finding 527 stupid repositories of random grc experiments that only work with GR3.5. I found the GR3.6 to 3.7 migration page last night and I suddenly find myself motivated to fork all these old modules and try update them to the new API. Anyone got any statistics on how community involvement changed after their projects moved to or from github? ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 11:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/3 "2014-09-29T23:09:04Z")
This is something that comes up at our dev calls (and other dev meetings) regularly, and we really need to address it sooner rather than later. George, if the support burden is getting to much, we can surely fix a short-term solution by migrating stuff to some temporary location (let’s take this specific discussion offline, though). In the future, we’d like to have something that ties in nicely with Pybombs, and also uses the gits. How exactly, that’s something we need to decide, and any community input on this is appreciated. Cheers, M ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 11:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/4 "2014-09-29T23:38:52Z")
On 09/29/2014 05:31 PM, George N. wrote: > Maintenance over time is simply just difficult. Once projects are > This is something that comes up at our dev calls (and other dev > appreciated. > > ``` > Cheers, > M > > ``` I have projects on CGRAN that are actively maintained. Most notably, simple-ra. But also, simple\_fm\_rcv, meteor\_detector, multimode, and SIDSuite. While I’m willing to find another place for them, it’s, as one might expect, a pain… ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 11:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/5 "2014-09-29T23:42:46Z")
Marcus, thanks for keeping up-to-date projects on CGRAN! Since you’ve always been actively involved, what would you like to see different and/or improved? It can still be the place where your projects live, I am just trying to make CGRAN more friendly to changes in the current community and to be more supportive of newer projects. The clear example has always been making it more git-centric. ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 11:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/6 "2014-09-29T23:33:03Z")
Thanks for the feedback, Chris and Martin. What I’m going to do is keep CGRAN down until we have some sort of plan/resolution and use it as a form of motivation. Every time I’ve managed to resurrect CGRAN from the dead, I just leave it go and forget about it for some time again. I think that the down time might help us come to a conclusion sooner. Several people have e-mailed me about access to the repository. I was able to get the repo back up, and it should be anonymously readable here: [https://www.cgran.org/svn/projects](https://www.cgran.org/svn/projects) To address Chris’ thoughts, I’ve always felt CGRAN was useful in two aspects: 1) To find useful and up-to-date projects (albeit rare), and 2) To find more historical projects that highlight the capabilities of GNU Radio and SDRs and to resurrect and/or build from them. I know the latter has been a killer, but I’ve found multiple times that people came to CGRAN to dig up old code and build something new from it. But if anything, these two types of projects need to be clearly marked and separated. Academically, I know that students are very willing to take brutally dead code and use pieces of it for projects. Maintenance over time is simply just difficult. Once projects are complete, many people move on but GNU Radio keeps on chugging. I know that I lost time to maintain my projects. Pybombs could at least guide the user to get correct versions, let them know there is a mismatch, etc. It can also provide the link from a project to where the actual code and repository are. I think that pybomb entries can point to github locations, right? On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 2:07 PM, Martin B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2014, 12:48am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/7 "2014-09-30T00:48:43Z")
On 29.09.2014 14:55, Marcus D. Leech wrote: > I have no religious convictions about git vs svn. > > I’d have to change a couple of scripts […] When CGRAN was inaugurated, github wasn’t as popular as it was (and GNU Radio was still on SVN itself). We would not have gone for a central SVN repo if github had been on our radar back then. I guess most people either share Marcus’ sentiment, or are biased towards git. So, ditching SVN is pretty much a no-brainer. However, one major difference between SVN and git is that the latter doesn’t have the concept of every dir being a repo in and of itself. This means if we simply pushed everything to a giant github repo, that would not be terribly useful (definitely not a replacement for CGRAN), although I can see that being a temp solution so that at the very least, nothing is lost (a big advantage of using github is that they’re less likely to lose data). Really, every CGRAN project should be pulled into it’s own little repo, e.g. on github. Migrating from SVN to git is really easy (even with preserving history and all). I guess we could put up instructions on how to do that if there’s popular demand. However, there’s also the wiki pages on CGRAN. We do need a strategy for those (and a way to access them). Keep the ideas and comments coming, people! Cheers, M ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2014, 1:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/8 "2014-09-30T01:08:45Z")
I agree with Martin that once we go to git, every project has its own independent repo. That shouldn’t take much time at all to do, I can just run some svn2git magic to spit out separate repositories. The question will be where those repositories live. I can host the repositories again. I could replace the tired Trac interface with Gitlab and then host the repositories locally and through there. If that’s the case, Github repositories could be forked in Gitlab and/or point to the Github repos? (e.g., for people who only want their code on Github). I think the downside of Gitlab is that it doesn’t seem to be very customizable to, for example, have a coherent single Wiki of some sort like Trac dd. It will be a bunch of separate Wikis buried in to each separate repository’s page. So I think we are agreeing so far on git with multiple repositories for each project. What we need to figure out is what the frontend is. On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Martin B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2014, 6:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/9 "2014-10-02T06:04:09Z")
On 09/29/2014 05:41 PM, George N. wrote: > Marcus, thanks for keeping up-to-date projects on CGRAN! Since you’ve > always been actively involved, what would you like to see different and/or > improved? It can still be the place where your projects live, I am just > trying to make CGRAN more friendly to changes in the current community and > to be more supportive of newer projects. The clear example has always been > making it more git-centric. One of the things I find myself constantly doing for projects on cgran is making manual snapshots. Github has the ability to make a snapshot both for head and for any tags, which has always been very useful. While I don’t care if no one wants to use github, or even git for that matter, some form of automatic snapshot for tags and/or revs would be very useful imho. Thanks, Zero\_Choas ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2014, 4:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/10 "2014-10-02T16:55:31Z")
Hi everyone, that seems to be a nice solution you’re proposing, George. What about having a uber-repo that uses external submodules? This way, you could have your single CGRAN repo, with all the packages as submodules, some documentation in a single wiki, all per gitlab, and just keep the projects as independent repos, hosted on a cgran machine or on github/osmocom/wherever. We get the functionality to backup “all the GNU Radio ecosystem” at once by running some git submodule update command, and pybombs could just clone that repo, and init submodules as the user installs them. Greetings, Marcus ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 11:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/11 "2014-09-29T23:57:39Z")
> Marcus, thanks for keeping up-to-date projects on CGRAN! Since you’ve > always been actively involved, what would you like to see different > and/or improved? It can still be the place where your projects live, > I am just trying to make CGRAN more friendly to changes in the current > community and to be more supportive of newer projects. The clear > example has always been making it more git-centric. > I have no religious convictions about git vs svn. I’d have to change a couple of scripts to pull from git if things were migrated to git, but apart from that, it’s no big deal for me. I haven’t actually used the web interface for CGRAN for quite some time. So I don’t have much of a feel for what exciting new things need to go with any re-design. I definitely think this needs a wider discussion, and keeping the existing repo alive is a good thing, since there are folks using CGRAN-resident Gr-based tools. ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2014, 12:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/12 "2014-10-03T00:45:48Z")
Marcus, I like the idea of an uber-repo with external submodules. That would mean these submodules could link to a repo we could provide the user, a repo they already have on github, or a repo they have on some other external server. But in the end, our uber repo would point to all of them and then they could update the commit that external submodule points to over time. Thanks for that suggestion. Rick, thanks for this suggestion also! I will make sure that we are able to include some sort of snapshot. When you say snapshot here, does that act as some sort of release or history? It must be different than a tag, since you say tags are part of a snapshot. Can you give me an example snapshot provided by some other service? On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 7:51 AM, Marcus M. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 8:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/13 "2014-10-06T08:23:19Z")
On 10/03/2014 12:44 AM, George N. wrote: > Marcus, I like the idea of an uber-repo with external submodules. That > would mean these submodules could link to a repo we could provide the > user, a repo they already have on github, or a repo they have on some > other external server. But in the end, our uber repo would point to all > of them and then they could update the commit that external submodule > points to over time. Thanks for that suggestion. Sorry for being a buzzkill here, but I don’t really like this except as a temporary/transition solution. Assume CGRAN really takes off and grows. Do you really want all OOTs out there in a single repo? What exactly is their logical connection, which would warrant them all being tied together in a super-repo? This would require someone to keep updating the submodules, too, which seems unnecessary. In the long run, I would assume people want to host their OOTs on github (or similar services), and CGRAN would simply be a link to those. As I said, during a transition time, we might want something else. But submodules are messy, and I suggest not using them for this particular application. M ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2014, 3:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/14 "2014-10-03T03:44:23Z")
On 10/02/2014 06:44 PM, George N. wrote: > since you say tags are part of a snapshot. Can you give me an example > snapshot provided by some other service? For example a github repo: > **[GitHub - gqrx-sdr/gqrx at v2.3.1](https://github.com/gqrx-sdr/gqrx/tree/v2.3.1)** > > v2.3.1 This link to a tag shows you the state of the repo when it was tagged, but the exciting part is along the right hand side where it says “download zip”: [https://github.com/csete/gqrx/archive/v2.3.1.zip](https://github.com/csete/gqrx/archive/v2.3.1.zip) Github also supports tgz (but not tbz2 or txz because apparently github is from 1995). To be able to download any commit as a tarball is a very very useful feature on github. Again, I don’t actually care about git or github, just that this specific feature is great. For some reason a lot of SDR projects just never seem to make releases (sometimes not even tags) and this saves me having to make manual tarballs (it also helps the source tarball be the same across all distros since we don’t each have to make our own). Thanks for the consideration, Zero ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 8:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/15 "2014-10-06T08:44:14Z")
On 10/06/2014 08:21 AM, Martin B. wrote: > but I don’t really like this except as a temporary/transition solution. > Assume CGRAN really takes off and grows. Do you really want all OOTs out > there in a single repo? What exactly is their logical connection, which > would warrant them all being tied together in a super-repo? > This would require someone to keep updating the submodules, too, which > seems unnecessary. > In the long run, I would assume people want to host their OOTs on github > (or similar services), and CGRAN would simply be a link to those. > As I said, during a transition time, we might want something else. > But submodules are messy, and I suggest not using them for this > particular application. Since, git 1.8.2 a git submodule can track a branch [1] (as opposed to pointing to a commit). That means that it is not necessary to update the submodules in the super-repo. A submodule is very similar to a pybombs recipe, a link to a repo and a branch. Most likely most of the repos (i.e. GNU Radio apps/modules) will be hosted at github or similar services. So nothing would change for the authors of the modules. (That’s at least my understanding of the proposed solution) Best, Bastian [1] [https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.2.txt#L186](https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.2.txt#L186) ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 7:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/16 "2014-10-06T19:17:13Z")
On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 1:43 AM, Bastian B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > submodules in the super-repo. A submodule is very similar to a pybombs > [1] > [https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.2.txt#L186](https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.2.txt#L186) My $0.02 cents on CGRAN: Having a directory of projects along with metadata such as author name and contact, status, GR API version compatibility, etc along with a source mirror and link to origin is really valuable. From this perspective I like CCAN: they have a ‘package’ format so they can parse and display that metadata in a convenient way on their web site (for an example see [ccan](http://ccodearchive.net/info/cpuid.html) ). We can use gr\_modtool to either fill in a mod\_info type file or request authors put data in their README in a nice way. Then CGRAN can display all of the project information, potentially provide a mirror, and point to the original source. I agree with Martin that the super-repo feels weird in the sense that there is no shared history or relationship between the histories of each project. If the goal is to make it easy to clone all projects at once then pybombs almost does that already and it’s very easy to modify (actually it’s probably a bug that pybombs fetch doesn’t work with --all). I do think it is convenient/useful to have a single base-URI to get all OOT modules from assuming someone doesn’t mind paying for the bandwidth to have people constantly downloading OOT projects. Also, what happens to a submodule if the origin disappears (for example someone loses interest and eventually deletes their github repo)? Nathan. ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 7:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/17 "2014-10-06T19:23:32Z")
Let me add one more thing about CGRAN while we are still trying to narrow down how to handle this. One reason I put CGRAN in place was to host code that might “disappear.” For example, students post it on university webpages and when they graduate, that hosting gets taken down. Additionally, someone creates an account on some code hosting service, and the project later gets taken down. That was the “archive” part of cgrAn. I guess the more we talk about just linking to a bunch of things, I wonder if we will lose one of those initial goals. On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 10:15 AM, West, Nathan [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 7:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/18 "2014-10-06T19:30:30Z")
It looks like github can mirror another git repo. It looks like mirrors don’t update automatically; the docs suggest using a cron job to automate, so if the hypothetical grad student’s repository goes away the CGRAN version could remain at the last published version. ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 9:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/19 "2014-10-06T21:05:18Z")
Interesting, Chris. Thanks for that info. The question would be, do we mirror everything? It seems like that’s a possibility. It’s nothing I think I could automatically set up. I typically have left it up to the authors to decide given their software license. On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 10:28 AM, Chris K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@george\_n](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/george_n)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2014, 9:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cgran-down-indefinitely-but-hopefully-not-for-long-want-feedback/232277/20 "2014-10-06T21:24:26Z")
New module authors could contact the CGRAN admin(s) to be listed in the directory and if an admin finds a really interesting module they can reach out to the author to say “your project seems neat, could you send us a request to be included in CGRAN?”. A CGRAN admin would add them to the mirroring tool config (just a list of repo URLs), and the mirror tool could check the license status before updating - possibly by ensuring that {LICENSE,COPYING}{,.txt,.md} exists and contains some known text. I’d be happy to help write some of the automation. I haven’t yet tested what happens when I fork a repo and the upstream deletes their repo… does all my work go away?