Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/07/08/21:52:36
John, I understand. I was soliciting idle talk hoping to find
something actionable in it. Like market research only less gross and
MBAish...
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 12:09 AM, Stefan Salewski <mail AT ssalewski DOT de> wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-07-08 at 22:02 +0000, Evan Foss (evanfoss AT gmail DOT com) [via
> geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>> A few people have said that projects slow when developers loose
>> interest. While everyone is here (admittadly sucked in by the gravity
>> of the other thread) it is worth asking what would excite developer
>> interest?
>
> Sorry to be so negative...
>
> But my feeling is, that chances for FOSS development in EDA area is
> generally very bad today. Generally activity in Free Open Source seems
> to shrink since a few years -- there may be many reasons for that. For
> EDA area, interest of people in free open source software seems to be
> especially low.
No offence but this is not a new insight. It is after all why I asked
the question.
> Here in Germany we have a large microcontroller and
> electronics forum -- very few people use KiCad, no one does contribute
> actively. For most people cheap is good enough, which is eagle or
> LT_Spice or the new web based tools, for example from Digikey. For the
> gEDA area -- I have learned in the last years that people really hate
> GTK. They hate the non native look for Mac and Windows, and they hate
> GTK coding in plain C. Most people even ignore that there are GTK
> bindings for many other languages available. When you do a google search
> "GTK vs Qt" 95% will vote for Qt. No one starts new projects in GTK
> today, some people may still work on Inkscape.
I really like GTK. No offense to QT but my machine is gentoo with Mate
as the desktop. I liked the feel and efficiency of GTK2 but I wanted
GTK3 compatibility.
> But Qt's popularity seems
> to be shrinking now although, which indeed was my expectation for some
> years already: Qt is a very big blob, closely coupled to C++, which is
> not so popular although in these days any more. And Qt's strength was
> the strong support by large companies in the past, which is gone now.
That is why QT is antethetical to the Unix mentality of small atomic
things the user combines into a flow. QT is more inline with what the
kicad people are doing than geda. IMHO
> With GTK, C, scheme there is really no hope for gEDA becoming popular
> again. Qt seems to help not much, Qucs is Qt for example, but it is very
> quiet. Exciting projects: Anthony's toporouter was considered exciting
> by some people, but he retired, no one continued the work. The C code
> was a nightmare indeed, I have understood nothing. Mr Wirts router was
> called exciting, Java code was available for a period, someone wrote
> that the code looked not bad.
I have been on this list since it was on the older domain in 2004. I
remember all of this.
> Is there continuation? The push&shove CERN
> router? Was called exciting. Is there continuation? Or Gnucap? Coded in
> C++, I think no one except the original author ever worked on it. But
> wait, there was a GSOC I think. No result?
Yea remember all that too. (avoiding the topic of PCB because of my
opinions starting other now tired debates)
GSOC has faded into a shallow husk of it's former self. It now mostly
exists to continue development of open source projects google finds
valuable in the long term. At least as I see it. They dropped a number
of former favourites last year and this one.
> But generally, EDA development is not that hard today. With a fine
> language, a fine GUI and good libraries a good EDA tool set can be
> developed in only a few thousend hours I guess. GUI may be the main
> problem, GTK is only accepted for Linux/Unix today. Native Mac or
> Windows GUI maybe instead? Or Android, HTML5?
I could debate that but it would just lead back into the other threads
endless debate over the perfect language which will no doubt end it us
all having to use PL/I, Ada or LISP for everything.
--
Home
http://evanfoss.googlepages.com/
Work
http://forge.abcd.harvard.edu/gf/project/epl_engineering/wiki/
- Raw text -