linrad (was Re: Self Introduction: Iain R. Learmonth)

[Iain R. Learmonth]

Hi Leif,

On Mon, Apr 06, 2015 at 04:58:07AM +0200, Leif Asbrink wrote:
> I am the developer of Linrad, a multi-OS package (originally 
> Linux only) that provides a SDR (software defined radio) that
> can be used with a large number of hardware. I do not know
> what might be required for a software to be acceptable to become
> a package in Fedora (or Debian) and my feeling is that Linrad
> might not be acceptable today.

Awesome! I came across linrad when looking for new software to include in
Debian. I filed a RFP (request for package) bug there and this bug has been
adopted already.

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=772086

When this is packaged in Debian, I would be happy to take a look at porting
the package to Fedora.

> I am however working on making it independent of other packages by having
> libraries loaded at run-time.  This means that Linrad would always work,
> but if the user asks for some particular hardware, there would be an error
> message telling what package to install to get access to the hardware.
> Many such packages have to be installed from source, but some of them are
> in the repos of the main Linux distros.

I would avoid putting messages into your code that talk about specific
distributions. A message to tell you what is missing, and maybe a link to a
webpage that explains where the package can be found for different
distributions would be better. We don't want to make it harder for other
distributions to package your code and a webpage can be easily updated with
contributions from others after the package is released. Do make sure the
URL can stay the same for a long time though.

> Linrad has a reputation of being difficult to install, which is
> utterly false! Using it properly is non-trivial however since the user 
> needs some knowledge of radio although many seem to think they need
> computing skils.

I've not actually used linrad myself, so I can't comment on any experiences,
but one of the aims of packaging is to remove the need for users to have to
go through the installation themselves. Sane defaults are compiled in and
the package should be ready to use once it is installed.

> At the moment I am working on the transmit side. The Linrad speech
> processor runs with a delay of about 50ms from microphone to
> antenna and then there is about 20 ms from antenna to loudspeaker.
> The total is less than 100 ms which makes it possible to use single 
> frequency duplex, "listen between words" in ssb mode.

This sounds really cool!

> Another line of development is by Jürgen Kahrs who is developing
> software to move FFT computations to OpenCL to use GPUs for
> faster processing.

This also sounds really cool!

> You can read about linrad here (and find a link to videos)
> http://www.sm5bsz.com/linuxdsp/linrad.htm

This is good. That's the URL I had on the RFP bug so I know we're both
looking at the same thing.

> There is a repo. Download like this:
> svn checkout https://svn.code.sf.net/p/linrad/code/trunk linrad

Ok, cool. We normally aim to base our packages on releases, but having a
link to the upstream development codebase is always useful so we can check
to see if you've already fixed things if we find things are broken.

> In case you think Linrad could qualify for a Fedora package,
> please tell me what might be necessary to change. Today
> Linrad comes in several flavours: linrad, xlinrad, flinrad,
> linrad64, xlinrad64, flinrad64 and clinrad. This will be changed.
> In a longer time-scale there is no need to support 32 bit code 
> on 64 bit platforms. The three different flavours for each 
> platform will be merged to a single program with a user option
> to select what kind of screen he wants (x11, svgalib or fbdev)
> to the extent they are available. This means there would be just one
> executable - although different on different platforms like
> clinrad which currently works with X11 only on the platform where
> it was compiled with cmake.

So, on the website it says "Linrad and watzo are free software. They are
free for anyone to use for any purpose." which worried me slightly, but I
see there is a LICENSE file in the Subversion repository. Does this license
apply to all files in the source repository? The reason that worried me is
that for Debian and Fedora we require not only that software is free to use,
but also other rights such as distribution, modification, etc.

  * http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines (for Debian)
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#SoftwareLicenses (for Fedora)

Licensing is one of the bigger problems we can have when it comes to
packaging new software, but as long as that is not a problem then all it
needs is some effort.

It does also help that you are interested in the software being packaged. (:

> Dear Iain, if you find the Linrad project interesting and if you
> or someone you know is interested in helping to make it fit to
> become a Fedora (or Debian or whatever) package, please have
> a look at the repo and tell me what would have to be done.

Milan Kupcevic (CC'd) is currently the owner of the bug in Debian, so I'll
let him update you on where he is with the packaging work. Debian is
currently in a freeze so there hasn't been much of a push for new packages
at the moment (they would be delayed entering our archives until the next
Debian release) but we hope to have a release this month and will hopefully
packaging can pick up shortly afterwards.

Thanks,
Iain.

-- 
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