Harald Welte wrote:
The osmocom projects and GNU radio are quite volatile, frequently changing, and more or less require staying constantly on the bleeding edge to get the most out of the projects, and to be able to contribute back of course!
Very few distributions are equipped to handle anything bleeding edge, and in particular binary based distributions are useless, because you have to wait for someone else to build that last commit. Not what you want.
I'm not really sure how those two relate. I regularly build all of the osmoocom code on Debian stable (which is known for its ancient versions). So I really don't think we have any dependencies to something that would not be part of any more or less current distribution of the last 2-3 years.
Yes, but you have no option but to build everything manually, I call it slackware style, while with a source based distribution it is more likely that there is actual support for bleeding edge packages. In Gentoo they're called "live" ebuilds; latest git is built and managed by the package manager. Dependencies are resolved. It's quite nice.
So I would think that all of those distributions (source-built or binary based) are equally well equipped to build and use any of the osmocom projects on them.
Certainly when building everything manually, but that's really quite primitive. Source based distributions generally have more powerful package management tooling was my message, which I think is on topic.
//Peter