Hi all- I am relatively new to the list but I have been reading and watching since 2005. Only recently have I been able to start using GNU radio to do any "serious" work here at Mitre. The biggest issue that everyone here complains of is documentation, so seeing the topic come up I had to put my two cents in. While intro pages are good, and definitely needed for people off the streets, the block level documentation is also severely lacking. It is basically a painful process to string something together for the first time. I consider myself a pretty strong comm engineer(not so great programmer :) ) so I understand what all the blocks do put I spend half or more of my time just trying to figure out what the in's and out's are and the parameters and the acceptable ranges. Some blocks are obviously better than others but it seems like I am always reverting back to hunting through the c++ code to figure it out.
For example somebody asked about this the other day and this is the only documentation via Doxygen for a relatively complex algorithm. *************************** Mueller and Müller (M&M) based clock recovery block with complex input, complex output. This implements the Mueller and Müller (M&M) discrete-time error-tracking synchronizer. See "Digital Communication Receivers: Synchronization, Channel Estimation and Signal Processing" by Heinrich Meyr, Marc Moeneclaey, & Stefan Fechtel. ISBN 0-471-50275-8. *************************** Pointing to the source theory is good but you still need to explain how to use the block via its parameters etc and there are always implementation specific details that will not be contained in the original theory explanation. Ideally documentation for a block should be something akin to the matlab simulink documentation for a block. Obviously this is major work, and I am the first one to admit that I hate documenting what I build, but at some point if we want this platform to be embraced by the common man (or woman) good documentation is a must. Perhaps a user editable wiki is the way to go to help cut down on the amount of work. Eventually stuff would get pretty good, theoretically. Anyways, just a thought, or two. Sorry for rambling. - Jeff Long -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of George Nychis Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 11:49 AM To: Greg Troxel Cc: Eric Blossom; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] a call for a better wiki Greg Troxel wrote: > My take is that after we have some content, and it becomes too much to > be listed on the front page, then it will make sense to have more > organized intro pages. > > Right, or the better we organize the intro pages the easier it is to see what kind of documentation we want and what is missing. Personally, I think the how to build a block and exploring gnu radio guides should be integrated into the wiki as a start. They should be broken down to be much less daunting, and by having them in the wiki we can actually edit them :) For example, they are a bit out of date with flow_graph and friends gone, but only Eric has the key. I really think that each of these guides could be broken down into multiple wiki pages to make them a bit more readable. - George _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
