gr-osmosdr maintainer needed

[Harald Welte]

Dear Osmocom SDR community,
Dear Dimitri,

the situation around gr-osmosdr has been deteriorating for years.
Among other things, I notice:
* there has not been a tagged release since 2014
* patches (e.g. fixing clang support) are not merged
* there is no support for gnuradio 3.8

I raised at least some of this both on-list (in June 2018 at
http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/osmocom-sdr/2018-June/001766.html)
and off-list in personal discussions, e.g. at CCCamp2019

It is clear that technically there are alternatives these days
(mainly SoapySDR, which didn't exist when gr-osmosdr started in 2012).

However, at the same time I'm seeing plenty of users asking about gr3.8
support, as there are [probably] lots of existing applications which
are not ported to other input blocks.  As the overall Osmocom project
leader, this puts me in a difficult position: I've never been involved
with gr-osmosdr myself, but I get various related e-mail which show that
there are users, and that they are struggling by a lack of maintenance.

It appears that original author and maintainer Dimitri has lost time
and/or interest in maintaining gr-osmosdr.  That's very sad, but it is a
fact that people have a limited amount of time, and priorities change.
I'd like to thank Dimitri and all other gr-osmosdr
developers/contributors for what they have done so far.

But what has unfortunately been missed here during the last 1-2 years is
passing the project over to a new maintainer or group of maintainers.
Just because the original author is not around anymore, it doesn't mean
the project has to die.  So with this message, I'm publicly calling for
some other community member[s] to step up and become maintainer[s] of
gr-osmosdr.

Who is interested in gr-osmosdr and willing to maintain it, possibly in
a team with other interested folks?

I would be more than happy to provide the respective accounts/access on
the osmocom.org redmine as well as the official osmocom.org upstream
repository.

There's a list of open issues at http://osmocom.org/projects/gr-osmosdr/issues

I know there are also many forks on github, including

* https://github.com/igorauad/gr-osmosdr/tree/gr3.8 gr3.8 support
* https://github.com/xtrx-sdr/gr-osmosdr/ with xtrx support
* https://github.com/zhovner/gr-osmosdr and https://github.com/Sevyls/gr-osmosdr
  with clang/MacOS related fix
* https://github.com/wirstrom/gr-osmosdr with soapy end-of-burst fix
* https://github.com/thegildedturtle/gr-osmosdr hackrf raspi signedness fix?
* https://github.com/ScanOC/gr-osmosdr print AirSpy serial number on connect
* https://github.com/romeojulietthotel/gr-osmosdr cosmetics
* https://github.com/racerxdl/gr-osmosdr spyserver support?
* https://github.com/rascustoms/gr-osmosdr airspy related patches
* https://github.com/newdreamlj/gr-osmosdr bladerf multi stream fix
* https://github.com/Lukeekul/gr-osmosdr bladerf pass source/sink args
* https://github.com/IW0HDV/gr-osmosdr perseus HF support
* https://github.com/dl1ksv/gr-osmosdr rs-hfiq support
* https://github.com/carpikes/gr-osmosdr/ hackRF AVX/SSE performance
* https://github.com/aports-ugly/gr-osmosdr gr3.8 + xtrx support
* https://github.com/amungo/gr-osmosdr ADSDR support
* https://github.com/0pq76r/gr-osmosdr/commits/master expose rtl-sdr gain stages

So there's no shortage of interesting fixes and features to investigate
and/or merge, even beyond the 'make a release and port to gr3.8'.

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
	Harald
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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