Well, I mentioned it here a few weeks ago and last week we did it. GNU Radio version 3.7.4 is now out and about. We're really happy with the release for a number of reasons. If you take a look at the release notes, you can see not only a lot of new features we've added on, but also the huge number of contributors. So not only are we feeling really good about the project itself, we have a great community of users that are doing really neat things and helping us improve our code. So a huge hand and big thanks to everyone!
I think that the release notes give you the basic idea of what's going on in this version, including ZeroMQ blocks for improved connections between networked flowgraphs over the UDP or TCP sources/sink, better QTGUI handling, and some nice improvements to the GRC interface. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, we now have our new FEC API concept included in gr-fec. Oh, and on that last note, we're very close to having some of the LDPC work done during last summer's GSoC integrated with the FEC API so we can all start to use it in our flowgraphs!
The good work is never done, though. We still have so much we can and want to do in this project, and so we've already started laying out some ideas and plans for release 3.7.5. There's some really fun work going on in GRC that I think everyone's going to love, and we're going to be one step closer to defaulting everything to QTGUI (don't worry! WXGUI will have a long lifetime as we migrate over!). We haven't made the full decision, yet, whether to switch the GRC defaults to QTGUI in this next release of wait until 3.7.6. I think we'll make that decision about midway through this release cycle to make sure we have enough time at get the development branch settled on that before the release.
Now, no guarantees, but I'm hoping we can get 3.7.5 out in time for GRCon14. That's a bit shorter than our normal time period between versions, but then again, we took a bit of extra time before 3.7.4. I think that it'd be nice going into the conference with a brand new version, plus a lot of features like some of the QTGUI and GRC updates are already done. We'll see what things look like by the end of August if it really makes sense to get 3.7.5 out the door by the conference.
Finally, I've said it elsewhere, and probably on other posts on this blog, but just a quick mention of 3.8. We have started collecting some ideas on what we're looking for with 3.8, but we haven't made any substantial efforts on it, yet. We're going to stick with 3.7 for a while longer because we feel like we're able to get a lot of work done with this API version without having to move on. In 3.8 we plan on updating our dependency list so we can be a little more free with features from our dependency libraries, and it'll help us fix a few holes we have in the runtime API that's causing some bugs that we've been tracking. But there's nothing really pushing us to a new API, yet, unlike our previous few API releases where we had some big changes. Instead, all of our big changes are all coming in our "minor" releases. But the only thing minor about it is our version naming scheme!