Changelog:
rP508731
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Changelog:

[3.8.0.0] - 2019-08-09

Witness me!

Tonight, we release GNU Radio 3.8.0.0.

It's the first minor release version since more than six years, not without
pride this community stands to face the brightest future SDR on general purpose
hardware ever had.

Since we've not been documenting changes in the shape of a Changelog for the
whole of the development that happened since GNU Radio 3.7.0, I'm afraid that
these release notes will be more of a GLTL;DR (git log too long; didn't read)
than a detailed account of what has changed.

What has _not** changed is the fact that GNU Radio is centered around a very
simple truth:

Let the developers hack on DSP. Software interfaces are for humans, not the
other way around.

And so, compared to the later 3.7 releases, nothing has fundamentally modified
the way one develops signal processing systems with GNU Radio: You write blocks,
and you combine blocks to be part of a larger signal processing flow graph.

With that as a success story, we of course have faced quite a bit of change in
the systems we use to develop and in the people that develop GNU Radio. This has
lead to several changes that weren't compatible with 3.7.

This is an excerpt only:

Fixed

Project Scope

Roughly 36 dBBug, (ETOOMANYBUGS)
Fixed .so versioning

Changed

Project Scope

C++11
merged the wholeness of the next branch
Dependency version bumps: CMake, GCC, MSVC, Swig, Boost
New dependencies: MPIR/GMP, Qt5, gsm, codec2
Removed dependencies: libusb, Qt4, CppUnit
Python: Python 2 & Python 3 compatible. 3.8 will be the last Py2k-compatible release series
gengen was replaced by templates (if you don't know gengen, don't do any research; save yourself that sorrow)
Modern CMake (as far as feasible at this point)
VOLK version updated to v2.0.0
.clang-format file now dictates coding style
clang-format'ed the whole tree.
installed CMake files now tell about configuration

gnuradio-runtime

reworked fractional tag time handling, especially in the context of resamplers

GRC

C++ generation as option
YAML instead of XML
removed blks2
much better canvas tooling
consistent gobject usage
ROUNDED ARROWS

gr-qtgui

moving from Qt4 to Qt5

gr-utils

gr_modtool now vastly improved

gr-vocoder

improved versatility
removed in-tree libgsm, libcodec2, use system-wide libs

Removed

1. Project Scope
Modules gr-comedi, gr-fcd and gr-wxgui are gone

gr-comedi

nobody could remember who used this, or for what. It has seen 0 active code contributions in the 3.7 lifecycle

gr-digital

python-based packet_encoder and related tools: Bugs that were sporadic and never fixed, so after long deprecation, we're removing it

gr-fcd

since it's currently untestable by the CI, it's being removed, as there was no code contributions. Generally, we strive to include all batteries with GNU Radio. Re-integration within a more general SDR interface would be desirable.

gr-utils

removed PyQwt (dead) based tools

gr-wxgui

Unmaintained, breaks on increasingly many systems, always was slower than Qtgui. We've been starting to tell people to migrate to Qt since at least 2015. Now, we're finally removing it.

Mike English notes:

Note that the 3.8.0.0 tarball is again available from
https://www.gnuradio.org/releases/gnuradio/ and the volk dependency
(a submodule in the git repo) is included so we can do away with
USES_GITHUB and go back to building from the official release tarball.

I've run this through portlint and poudriere already, so it should apply