Mail Archives: geda-user/2013/01/16/22:32:04
> But from where I sit, it appears that to a great extent pcb users
> (including you) simply took over the gEDA project,
From my point of view, developers kept leaving the project until only
a few dedicated ones remained. I wouldn't say we "took over" the
project as much as "got left with" the project. At the moment, I'm
doing my best to get more developers involved, and any destructive
comments are very much unwanted.
> so this is not the statement of an unbiased observer or an unbiased
> process.
That was Ales' statement on the main geda page many years ago. I've
pointed this out to you many times, and yet you still refuse to believe
it.
> I realize that pcb has some enthusiastic users and developers. That
> should not blind you to the fact that some of us have found pcb
> difficult. I suspect there are many more such people than you
> realize: they try it, give up, and go away, never realizing that pcb
> isn't a necessary component of a gEDA design flow.
I am not blind to pcb's usability issues, but I resent the constant
reminders of them and constant implications that the pcb developers
are somehow deficient. Such reminders and implications are not
constructive.
Users who "give up and go away"... not much we can do about those,
once they leave we have no way of getting feedback about why they
left, unless they choose to inform us. What you "suspect" is useless
too, unless you have hard data to back it up you're just being
negative. All we can really work with are what our current users
actually want, since we *can* get feedback from them. Plus, we've
made it very clear to you in the past that the gEDA developers work on
gEDA to meet their own needs, not yours, and not the average EDA user.
If others benefit from our hard work, we're happy to let them and glad
they found some use from our efforts. If they want to help develop
gEDA, for whatever reason, we're happy to have their help.
> > What you're thinking of is gaf, not gEDA, which
> > is just the schematic capture tools.
>
> But pcb is logically a "friend" of gEDA, sharing neither
> conventions, file formats, nor code with the gEDA suite, but
> interoperable. So, that terminology is confusing.
You can make up your own interpretations all you want, but the project
doesn't agree. gEDA encompasses many disjoint repositories, including
pcb. "gaf" is what comes from the geda-gaf repository.
> I suspect most aren't really aware that there are alternatives.
Given the popularity of other free EDA packages, I doubt that.
> > Ben wrote a tool that's designed to work with particular software
> > packages, please don't complain that it doesn't support your favorate
> > alternate packages - either appreciate what he's done or do it
> > yourself.
>
> I appreciate Ales's care in the design of gEDA, which is the root of
> its flexibility.
I was referring to what Ben did, not what Ales did.
> Shouldn't we emphasize to new gEDA users that they have this
> freedom?
New gEDA users want the easiest/fastest path that results in them
getting their project done. If the first thing we tell them is to
find some other software package to get their job done, we are doing
ourselves a huge disservice.
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