All,
The good news is that this installer can be used side by side with the GR-3.7 installer. While there may be minor issues where they overlap, i.e. shared per-user configuration files and overwritten shortcuts, generally one should be able to simultaneously install (and run) 3.7 and 3.8 installations on windows.
The bad news; why a beta after GR-3.8 has been in release for a while? Because many of the OOT blocks that were included in the installer in the past have either not been ported, or have been ported via fork. gr-osmosdr is a critical one. So this version may include OOT blocks that may be unstable or partially functional. I have, however, found a version of gr-osmosdr that appears to be working so that was a key driver for the release.
While several OOT blocks have not been included, I have added the following: gr-soapy and SoapySDR and AirSpyHF drivers (both untested due to lack of hardware). Also, this version still uses Python 2.7. As mentioned in another email thread, once we have a good stable version of GR3.8 w/ py2.7, then I focus on the python3 upgrade. I'm actually looking forward to that as everything will be using standard compilers and there should be an immense simplification of the build process. I also hope to be able to add some of the new blocks that have been built recently as well.
Another minor fix is the removal of a environment variable assignment that was causing nuisance warnings about duplicate blocks on GRC startup.
Enjoy and please send feedback. I have not yet pushed all the script changes to the github repo, so do not expect to be able to build 3.8 at this point straight out of the gate with them. Also, I'm not releasing Debug and AVX2 optimized versions while in beta. I'm not sure if anyone is actually using these, so if these options are something you'd like to continue to see, please let me know. Otherwise I'm thinking about scrubbing them out when I do the py3 upgrade.
Geof