8 May
2018
8 May
'18
2:25 a.m.
G'day Harald and Max,
There are some very good points in Haralds email and IRC excerpt. There's a
few things that we can very easily change and some others that might take a
bit more effort or need some help from others. Please feel free to chime in
and correct me or add comments. Some of the points I make are just me
rambling about the project in general and might not be relevant to Harald /
Holger etc, so if this is the case, please feel free to ignore me :)
* Originally, the list was set to private when Stevie created the mailing
group back in early 2008. While I'm not sure the exact reasons were for
this at the time, but I think may have been done to keep the
"signal-to-noise" ratio of the list nice and high. Of course this made the
list harder to find and join, which I think has turned people away, as the
group was hidden and they couldn't see messages without having to join up -
when they were only wanting to browse for find more information on the
project to see what it can do. With this in mind, I have changed the groups
settings so that it will appear in search results from now on.
Unfortunately we can't make the group public due to a restriction from
Yahoo that says "Restricted and Private groups cannot be made Public
later".
Since Yahoo is now holding us back from being properly "open" with the
mailing lists, I too am in favour of a migration to an lists.osmocom.org
mailing list. If there is any way we can migrate the entire message history
from Yahoo into an osmocom list, that would be great too, but of course
it's not totally necessary.
* Installation difficulties - originally, when GNUradio and OP25 were
undergoing rapid development, there were a lot of pre-requisites required,
and the build process wasn't very smooth. This has all been fixed for a
number of years now, and Max has fully scripted the installation so if you
are using a supported linux distro (Ubuntu, Raspbian etc) then installing
and building OP25 is as simple as running ./install.sh. Sadly as they say,
"mud sticks" and the impression is that it's still hard to build, even
though it's not the case. Of course many of the "how to' articles on the
net are out of date now - perhaps some up to date articles or maybe youtube
videos might help with this.
* Various forks (boatbod, Balint etc) and most development happening in
"Max" branch - This is a problem that we have spoken about previously and
didn't find a solution for. Ideally, I think that new features and code
should end up in the mater branch on the osmocom git repo. This way, it's
in a single place, it's obvious what it's there for (master being the main
central repo) and there's no confusion. I think we would need two things -
away we can add developers ssh keys to the osmocom git repo, and also a way
to have a pull request type feature where other developers can submit their
code, and have say, Max, or someone look at the changes and them merge them
in. The main reason that development has ended up in the Max branch is
because Max does nearly all of the development work, and any changes that
others have made that are suitable, have been merged in manually by Max.
The Balint and Graham (boatbod) forks in particular havesome features that
would be nice to have in master. The other thing to keep in mind is that
since Max has done most of the development work, we need to be able to
ensure that all the coding styles and overall architecture of the codebase
are consistent with what Max has intended.
* Lastly - are there any IRC channels that we could contribute to? Or any
other forums for this type of thing that might help us communicate the
project status better? It sounds like this is really where we're falling
down, as I know for a fact that the features and abilities of OP25 are some
of the best available - for example the QPSK receiver works just as well as
a commercial P25 radio, and it absolutely kills any commercial P25 scanner.
I certainly want to make sure that the project is as "open" as possible,
and if experienced developers / SDR users, such as the Osmocom guys feel
the project is dead, then it means we have some work to do in communicating
things a bit better. As Stevie originally intended, the "O" in OP25 is for
free and open...
Oh, also, yes the OP25 core contributors are spread out all around the
globe - unfortunately getting to Europe is a little tricky!
Cheers,
Matt
On 8 May 2018 at 06:14, ikj1234i(a)yahoo.com [op25-dev] <
op25-dev(a)yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Hello Harald, and also hello to all the semi-anonymous persons in the IRC!
The op25-dev yahoo group was set up long ago, prior to my involvement with
the OP25 project. As to the question about why it's marked "private" my
own opinion is that "Y!" makes that the default (and that's due primarily
to "Y!" business model considerations) and makes it non-obvious how to
change the default.
I would be very open to moving the primary discussion group to an
osmocom-hosted resource. There is no reason to have it hosted at its
current site and the are certainly no reason(s) that I know of to keep it
"private". I have always hesitated to ask you and Holger for anything
because of my feeling that you guys already do a lot for us and even so on
a 100% volunteer basis. Nonetheless I would be in favor of moving the
primary ML up to lists.osmocom.org going forward. However I would also
like to hear from others on this in case there are reason(s) I'm not aware
of that this would be a bad idea. It is a kind offer and I know we are not
the only users currently hosted on "Y!" who are looking to jump to greener
pastures. On that issue the timing could not be better.
As far as the questions about the current architecture of OP25 there is
more that I can cover in this brief note. When the mainline gnu radio
project deprecated support for wx-gui that was an almost-fatal blow to the
project. The GRC interface had never been a good fit for our needs and we
had evolved a wx-gui implementation of a trunked P25 receiver (which blows
the drawers off any current scanner on P25 simulcast trunking). The
removal of wx-gui caused a mental note to be made, not to depend too
closely on gnu radio features, since they have a regular habit of
disappearing. Accordingly the direction has been toward running the
receiver UI in a web browser, with plotting functions handled using gnuplot
to generate PNG files for near real time display in the browser. This
interface (i.e., the HTTP interface) has matured nicely.
As for the other questions, I am in the USA and hate long trips. If there
is a conference in the New York area I'd be most interested. OP25 also has
xMBE voice synthesis and transmit support for d-star, yaesu fusion (both
half rate and full rate), two-slot DMR BS as well as P25 FDMA. I would be
most happy to answer any and all questions about OP25 and would be grateful
to have access to the forum(s) where these questions can be discussed more
fully.
Max KA1RBI