Re: Windows Installers 3.8.0.0 BETA Available

[Marcus Müller]

This is great news! Thank you, Geof!
On Mon, 2019-11-11 at 21:07 -0500, Geof Nieboer wrote:
> All,
> 
> A BETA version of the windows 64-bit installer for GR3.8 is available
> here (https://www.gcndevelopment.com/gnuradio/index.htm).  The top
> link is for the 3.7 version, beta 3.8 is the second link down from
> the top.
> 
> 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