Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/07/08/20:15:51
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. 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. 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.
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. 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?
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?
- Raw text -