[Ground-station] Call for Comment and Critique - KA9Q-SDR readme

[Phil Karn]

On 4/24/18 08:16, Douglas Quagliana wrote:
> After spinning up an Ubuntu 16.04LTS machine, and installing the
> dependencies in the dependencies file, it compiles (with a few warnings,
> but it compiles).

Yeah, ubuntu's C compiler sets a few more warnings by default.

I am not sure how to feel about ignoring return values. It all depends
on whether you can do anything meaningful with a unexpected return, like
recover from an error. If the only thing you can think of is to throw an
assert() failure, I'd rather not do that by default in code other people
are going to run. I almost always leave assertions on when I run it
myself, but when it's somebody else I prefer to press on as best as I can."

Imagine:

Armstrong: "Houston, give us a reading on the 1201 alarm."

Aldrin: "Uh, it says.... 'Assertion failed, line 25597, file navigate.c:
it's dark on a tuesday and fizzbin != royal. Real-time navigation
terminated. Core dumped. Go see Margaret Hamilton'.

Armstrong: "Does that help, Houston? Now what?!"

> (warning on ignoring the return value from asprintf) then it ends saying
> that there is no rule to make 'bandplan.txt', so the makefile needs a
> small tweak.

It's actually a text file I was keeping in rcs and forgot to check out
before pushing over. I'll do that.

> Add a dependency on gcc - the one in 1404LTS doesn't seem to work but
> gcc 5.4.0 in 1604LTS seems to be okay.

Yeah, I've begun to take advantages of some of the more recent additions
to the language, like loop variable declarations inside for() statements.

Phil