This repository is maintained primarily by contributors at GSI/FAIR and the wider community. Decisions are made with a focus on correctness, maintainability, performance, and long-term sustainability.
Maintainers set technical direction for the core, review and merge contributions, and triage issues/discussions.
Contributors may submit issues, discussions, documentation, tests, and code.
Most changes are decided via pull request review. For changes affecting architecture, APIs/ABI, scheduler/runtime semantics, performance-critical paths, or platform support: start a discussion first, gather feedback, then proceed with a PR once there is alignment.
Maintainers have final say on merges to keep the project coherent and maintainable.
GNU Radio 4 follows a core + out-of-tree (OOT) development model. The core provides the framework; application-specific functionality lives in OOT repos.
Core changes are accepted when they:
- fix bugs, improve performance, or improve maintainability,
- enable or unblock OOT development,
- are backed by a demonstrated need (working prototype, OOT module, or concrete use case).
A concrete use case helps reviewers evaluate scope and priority — without one, proposals are harder to assess and tend to take longer.
Maintainer time is limited. We prioritise:
- correctness and stability of core behaviour,
- maintainability and test coverage,
- performance-critical work,
- security fixes,
- changes that unblock OOT development,
- documentation that reduces support load.
Feature requests are not promises. Small contributions are appreciated, but they do not create an obligation for maintainers to deliver additional work.
The team's current focus and planned work is visible on the project board.
All participants are expected to follow CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.