Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/07/09/12:40:56
I am going to punt this to it's own thread.
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Britton Kerin
(britton DOT kerin AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]
<geda-user AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 8:01 PM, <gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 8 Jul 2015, 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?
>>
>>
>> I am an user of gEDA; mostly gschem and PCB. I never contributed anything,
>> so my opinion is of an outsider's and is mostly about how/why I didn't join.
>>
>> First, my generic answer. What makes me work on a random open source
>> project? For me, it's a combination of these, probably in this order or
>> priority:
>>
>> 1. It's fun to code it - in hobby projects this is clearly the top prio
>>
>> 2. I need the feature - in a project ran by others, it's unlikely I'd work
>> on a feature I wouldn't need or use directly. I think I'd leave
>> such features for other developer. It's a bit different in the projects I
>> run, for some reason I feel more responsibility there.
>>
>> 3. My work is useful and is built into the project; my patches are not
>> thrown out and there are no unreasonable barriers that make any contribution
>> 10x more complicated and time consuming than if it was my own project. This
>> point may look somewhat fuzzy in this generic form, but it is very clear in
>> practice and the decision is easy when I send a few patches.
>>
>> 4. This is a combination of 1 and 3: the project has a "roadmap"; it doesn't
>> even have to be a written one, but generally it's going towards some
>> specific goals that are recognizable with the naked eye of an average user.
>> The goals should be at least partially aligned with my exceptations about
>> the project. In other words: the project at least a bit tries to achieve
>> what (as an user) I expect/want.
>>
>> ****
>> DISCLAIMER: I don't want to trigger a VCS-war, and I don't mean any offense.
>> I do realize developers of gEDA are intelligent, skilled people with their
>> own reasons to code what they code. I am merely trying to describe what
>> makes me not to consider contribution.
>> ****
>>
>> My specific answer in case of PCB:
>>
>> - DVCS kills point 1. and 3. for me. It often kills 4. too, but in case of
>> PCB I couldn't ever see a clear roadmap since I started to use it in the mid
>> 2000s.
>
> You should really try again on DVCS. Its just totally better and the world
> isn't going back, don't shut yourself out of having fun on 90% of new software.
>
>> - In practice this means random people are working in random branches on
>
> This is certainly true of gEDA but not because of DVCS.
>
>> - The combinaiton of the above two means I can't see a central repo where
>> developers would really commit useful (-for-me) changes on a regular basis
>> pushing the project in a direction I like at least a bit. New versions tend
>> to be less aligned with my needs as user. When I was using the official
>> version, in the last few years each upgrade was a risk of a bad surprise.
>>
>> - Bad experience with contribution from the far past (others say these
>> things got improved lately). Many years ago I tried to fix a small bug but
>> getting my patch accepted took too long and I had to spend too much time
>> fine tuning my patch for no apperant reason. Later on I tried to contribute
>> by working out an external example code for getting shorts displayed better.
>> Developers got distracted into a "before we can deal with this, we need to
>> clean up the infrastructure of PCB here a bit" recursion (this happens a lot
>> with me in my own projects too!). All in all, I consider both occasions
>> total waste of my time which made it easy to move on to other projects.
>
> The people in charge of the official repo, such as it is, don't really like
> dealing with some types of contributions. This is apparently a widespread
> feeling, but until we get someone who wants to take charge of a more aggressive
> repo nothing will change.
>
>> - PCB started to take directions in the last 4..5 years that I didn't really
>> like. The new features were much more often annoying and contra-productive
>> than useful for me. I started to compile PCB from source to turn off opengl
>> (normally I'd install the debian package). The features I really wanted or
>> the features I'd find useful didn't stir much interest lately. At some point
>> a few years back, after a new version introduced
>> yet-another-bunch-of-code-I-didn't-want, I just decided to fork an older
>> version of PCB. I implemented the features I wanted, and I don't have to
>> worry how a new release would be stuffed with features I'd never need.
>>
>> - Now that I have my fork, it's unlikely that I'd contribute to the official
>> stuff for simple, small, local, selfish reasons: I obviously do all the
>> little things the way I enjoy the most which makes working on my fork much
>> more attractice any time I feel like coding something for PCB. It's a
>> one-way mechanism.
>>
>> - It is important to mention that I could do this only because even that old
>> version of PCB that I choose was mature enough.
>
> This is the death spiral gEDA is stuck in. Main line development is so slow
> that (essentially) private forks are more attractive, which in turn slows
> development more, etc.
>
> Britton
--
Home
http://evanfoss.googlepages.com/
Work
http://forge.abcd.harvard.edu/gf/project/epl_engineering/wiki/
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