docs: update release notes for 3.7.10 release

Author: jmcorgan

RELEASE-NOTES.md

@@ -1,84 +1,212 @@
-ChangeLog v3.7.9.3
-==================
+ChangeLog v3.7.10
+=================
 
-This is the final, bug-fix only release of the 3.7.9 release series.
+This significant feature release of the 3.7 API series, and
+incorporates all the bug fixes implemented in the 3.7.9.3 maintenance
+release.
 
 
 Contributors
 ------------
 
 The following list of people directly contributed code to this
-release.
+release:
 
  * A. Maitland Bottoms <[email protected]>
  * Andrej Rode <[email protected]>
  * Andy Sloane <[email protected]>
  * Andy Walls <[email protected]>
+ * Chris Kuethe <[email protected]>
  * Clayton Smith <[email protected]>
  * Daehyun Yang <[email protected]>
+ * Derek Kozel <[email protected]>
+ * Federico La Rocca <[email protected]>
  * Geof Nieboer <[email protected]>
  * Glenn Richardson <[email protected]>
+ * Glenn Richardson <[email protected]>
  * Jiří Pinkava <[email protected]>
  * Johannes Schmitz <[email protected]>
  * Johnathan Corgan <[email protected]>
+ * Kevin McQuiggin <[email protected]>
  * Laur Joost <[email protected]>
  * Marcus Müller <[email protected]>
  * Martin Braun <[email protected]>
+ * Matt Hostetter <[email protected]>
+ * Michael Dickens <[email protected]>
  * Nathan West <[email protected]>
  * Paul Cercueil <[email protected]>
+ * Paul David <[email protected]>
  * Philip Balister <[email protected]>
+ * Ron Economos <[email protected]>
+ * Sean Nowlan <[email protected]>
  * Sebastian Koslowski <[email protected]>
+ * Seth Hitefield <[email protected]>
  * Stefan Wunsch <[email protected]>
+ * Tim O'Shea <[email protected]>
  * Tom Rondeau <[email protected]>
  * Tracie Renea <[email protected]>
 
+## Major Development Areas
+
+This release sees the integration of a number of long-time development
+efforts in various areas of the tree, including GRC, new packet/burst
+communications features for gr-digital, new standards implementations
+for gr-dtv.  In addition, it incorporates all of the bug fixes
+released as part of the 3.7.9.3 maintenance release.
+
+
+### GRC
+
+The GNU Radio Companion development environment continues to undergo
+rapid development and refactoring. The tools and workflow have been
+improved in the following ways:
+
+ * Variable explorer panel and option to hide variables from canvas
+ * Nicer block documentation tool-tip and properties dialog tab
+ * Screenshots can have transparent background
+ * Darker color for bypassed blocks
+ * Select all action
+ * Block alignment tools
+ * Added bits (unpacked bytes) as a data type
+ * Show warning for blocks flagged as deprecated
+ * Remove [] around categories in the block library
+ * Separate core and OOT block trees via the category of each block
+
+The refactor of GRC continues. This should be mostly feature neutral
+and make it easier for new contributors to come in and make useful
+changes. Part of this is deprecating blks2 and and xmlrpc blocks and
+moving them to components where they would be expected to be found
+rather than the GRC sub-tree.
+
+### Packet Communications
+
+A long-time feature branch developed by Tom Rondeau has been merged
+into the tree, implementing new blocks and methods for packet
+communications.  This is intended to replace much of the older,
+overlapping, and Python-only packet-based code that already exists.
+As this code matures, we will be marking this older code as deprecated
+with the plan to remove it in the new 3.8 API.
+
+### DTV
+
+DTV has new transmitters for DVB-S and ITU-T J.83B 64QAM. New support
+for DVB-S2X VL-SNR code rates, modulation, and framing for AMSAT are
+also available.
+
+A significantly improved OFDM symbol synchronizer was implemented for
+the DVB-T receiver (Ron Economos, Federico La Rocca).
+
+## Other Feature Development
+
+### Runtime
+
+Clear tags and reset all item counters when merging connections
+between blocks, which prevents bad values from being propagated on
+lock/unlock operations.
+
+Blocks always set their max_noutput_items before a flowgraph starts if
+it hasn't already been set.
+
+Added some options to gnuradio-config-info that prints information
+about the gnuradio prefs file. The old customized preference file
+reader is replaced with a boost program options object.
+
+### QT GUIs
+
+The QT GUI widgets can now toggle axis labels and the frequency sink
+has a new feature to set the y-axis label. This could be useful for
+changing units on calibrated measurements.
+
+The QT GUI Entry widget has a new message port that emits a message
+containing the new text whenever editing is finished.
+
+QT widgets recently had an optional message port to plot PDUs. This
+release adds a feature to plot the tag metadata contained in the PDU.
+
+A new example shows how to build a C++ only QT based application.
+
+### gr-digital
+
+New QA for tagged stream correlate access code blocks further cement
+how these blocks should be behaving.
+
+16QAM is now available from the GRC constellation object dialog drop
+down menu.
+
+### gr-analog
+
+The frequency modulator now has sensitivity exposed through
+controlport.
+
+New FM pre emphasis and de-emphasis filters. The previous filters were
+effectively all-pass filters. There is a very nice write up on the new
+filters in gr-analog/python/analog/fm_emph.py
+
+A new message port to sig_source is available that can set signal
+frequency with the same convention as gr-uhd usrp_source.
+
+### gr-filter
+
+Use the max_noutput_items in start() to allocate FFT buffers for the
+PFB decimator rather than always allocating/freeing a buffer in
+work().
+
+### gr-blocks
+
+Add a run-time accessor and setter for interpolation of repeat blocks.
+
+vector_sink.reset() clears tags now
+
+Add accessors for the vector_source repeat flag so it's settable
+outside the ctor.
+
+Fix tuntap devices MTU size. Previously MTU size argument was used to
+allocate correct buffer size, but didn't actually change the MTU of
+the underlying device.
+
+The UDP source block can read gr prefs file for the payload buffer
+size or default to the existing value of 50.
 
-Bug fixes
----------------
+Yet another block making use of VOLK: the divide_cc block is now 10x
+faster on some machines.
 
-* cmake: Quiet excessive warnings from cmake regarding deprecated
-  usage. (Stefan Wunsch)
+### gr-uhd
 
-* gnuradio-runtime: Fixed race condition during flowgraph
-  locking/unlocking (Jiří Pinkava)
+New argument in usrp_source initializer to start streaming on the
+start of a flowgraph which defaults to true (the existing behavior).
 
-* gnuradio-runtime: Fixed incorrect pmt serialization for double
-  (Johannes Schmitz)
+Add a clock-source argument to uhd_fft.
 
-* gnuradio-runtime: Fixed invalid string reference usage (Daehyun
-  Yang)
+A new message command handler for the usrp_source block will trigger a
+time and rate tag to be emitted.
 
-* gr-audio: Removed inline comments in conf file to workaround parsing
-  bug (Marcus Mueller)
+Added support for importing, exporting, and sharing LOs.
 
-* gr-blocks: Fixed stream corruption at termination with UDP
-  source/sink blocks. (Andy Sloane)
+### gr-audio
 
-* gr-blocks: Fixed tag propagation for stream mux block (Andrej Rode)
+Refactor audio sink for windows with multiple buffers to prevent
+skipping.
 
-* gr-digital: Fixed incorrect symbol reporting for unusual carrier
-  allocations in OFDM blocks (Martin Braun)
+### modtool
 
-* gr-digital: Fixed missing documentation in OFDM blocks (Martin
-  Braun)
+Add an option to set the copyright field for new files.
 
-* gr-dtv: Fixed broken assertions in DVB-T blocks (Clayton Smith)
+New modules will detect PYBOMBS_PREFIX and install to the defined
+location.
 
-* gr-fec: Cleaned up and fixed LDPC encoder/decoder pair for memory
-  handling, documentation, and Python function errors. (Tracie Renea)
+Add versioning support for OOT modules by default.
 
-* gr-filter: Improved documentation iir_filter blocks. (Laur Joost)
+### Builds
 
-* gr-filter: Fixed broken imports of optfir module in examples (Jiří
-  Pinkava)
+Enable controlport for static builds.
 
-* gr-uhd: Fixed timing of set_sample_rate call during initialization
-  (Marcus Mueller)
+Enable GR_GIT_COUNT and GR_GIT_HASH environment variables for extended
+versioning number for packagers.
 
-* gr-zmq: Accomodate gcc 6.x changes to casting requirements (Philip
-  Balister)
+We explicitly set the C/C++ standards to C++98 and gnu11 rather than
+use the compiler defaults since many compilers are moving to C++11 by
+default.  Incidentally this caused minor breakage with a subtle VOLK
+API fix in gr-dtv which was also fixed.
 
-Numerous MSVC/mingw incompatibilities that have crept in the last few
-releases have been corrected in this release. Special thanks go to
-Geof Gnieboer and Paul Cercueil (Analog Devices, Inc.) for their
-testing and patches.
+Fixed finding GNU Radio + VOLK in non-standard prefixes when compiling
+OOT modules.