All,
The first of the release 3.2 series tarballs have been posted to
gnuradio.org:
http://gnuradio.org/releases/gnuradio/gnuradio-3.2rc0.tar.gz
http://gnuradio.org/releases/gnuradio/gr-howto-write-a-block-3.2rc0.tar.gz
These are essentially the same as the current trunk, except that they
are distributed as tarballs rather than requiring the Subversion
client. This means they have all the same features, build
requirements, and known bugs as the trunk.
The main purpose of this release candidate is to test that the
tarballs have been created correctly, have all the needed files, and
can build and install without errors. The 3.2 development effort has
gone on for quite some time, yet all of its testing and usage to date
has been through checked-out copies of the trunk. So it is possible
that we have some latent build system bugs when building from
tarballs.
Just a few words about how we handle stable and development versions
of GNU Radio:
All of the development for GNU Radio occurs either on our “trunk”
branch in our repository or in developer branches that ultimately get
merged with the trunk. This is where you find all the latest features
as well some things that are work in progress but not fully
functional. Users are free to obtain the trunk software via version
control client (Subversion), but the only strongly enforced policy we
have here is that the software should compile correctly. People who
have written their own Python scripts or C++ applications that link to
or otherwise use the trunk version of GNU Radio have no guarantees
that it will continue to have the same API or work as expected. We do
periodically perform deep surgery that breaks compatibility.
The official releases of GNU Radio are forked off the trunk at
intervals to form a stable branch that only receives bug fixes and
minor feature updates. While development continues on the trunk, we
backport bug fixes or subsets of new functionality in such a way that
all your existing code based on the stable release should continue to
work without impact. We did this for release 3.0 through 3.0.4 and
3.1 through 3.1.3, and this release candidate series will converge to
become the new “stable” branch, 3.2.
Johnathan C.
Corgan Enterprises LLC