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GREP 0026 -- [Rework gr_modtool's templating]

History:

  • 2021-11-29: Initial Draft
  • 2022-01-17: Set to Active

Abstract

Untangle modtool's templates from strings embedded in Python code, rendering of old-style format strings ("Copyright %s" % datetime.now().year), Mako templates and manual replacements. Get rid of cruft.

Copyright / License

GREP "Rework gr_modtool's templating" by Marcus Müller is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Motivation

GNU Radio's modtool has quite some history and has come from the need to automate the copying of a 3.5/3.6-era "square_ff" howto OOT to a comprehensive tool that does much more, including functionality to parse and generate program code.

It also had to go through a Python version change, be migrated away from Cheetah, and grew alongside with its developers.

As a result, many provisionary solutions became state of the art. Over time, this introduced a couple subtle and not-so-subtle bugs.

A cleaner structure for templates should not only simplify development, but also reduce the likelihood of mistakes.

Description

Cruft Removal

Remove all pre-3.9 templating that would need to be reworked.

Templating unification

Code for blocks, headers, python files etc is mostly found under modtool/templates/templates.py as strings.

  • Make a new directory modtool/templates/templates
  • Write the strings from templates.py into individual something.mako files in that directory
  • Install that directory alongside with gr-newmod
  • Use Mako's TemplateLookup functionality to directly look up templates in that directory
  • To enable in-tree testing, make the lookup order such that module source directory/templates/templates is visited first, then the installed location ($GRDATA/templates)

Furthermore, these templates currently are structured to contain the "common" parts, and then a lot of if/else clauses on the individual block types.

  • Replace the convoluted if/else structure with Mako <%block name="snippet_name"> in the "master1 template", which the actual block types specialize through Mako's <%inherit file="master.mako"> mechanism.

Footnotes

  1. "master" as in "slide master", "original mold" ↩