Mail Archives: geda-user/2016/07/16/13:53:20
Hi all,
the session went just as expected: with no user joining. As far as I can
tell after lurking at the past few pcb mainline code sprints, this is
totally in-line with the user activity in pcb mainline. At least zero is a
nice, round number.
This made me make up my mind about future directions. Pcb-rnd reached the
stage where it had all the features I ever wanted (the "Make It Work"
step), a few releases ago. Now it is reaching a new level where the
infrastructure in the background looks and works like how I think they
should ("Make It Right"). So it's close to being "finished". Which means I
should probably stop investing as much time in it as I did in the past
months and move my focus on something that is more broken (gschem).
Thus my next steps in pcb-rnd are:
1. I promised I'd try the user request driven way too, so I picked the
"draw bus" feature from the feature poll
2. I contacted all the 4 users who signed up for testing such a feature
and asked to comfirm they can spare the necessary time to keep testing
up with development rate and asked them to do some initial smoke test on
pcb-rnd
3. if enough of them gives positive answer I start implementing the
feature with their support
4. while waiting for the answers, I am finishing the conf rewrite and
roll a release.
If 3. fails, I will probably switch to designing and coding cschem (a
replacement for gschem and gnetlist - I'd say contribution is welcome
right from the design phase, but I know how it works). If 3. works, I will
try to repeat it with other top features, and spend about 1/4 time on
pcb-rnd and 3/4 time on other projects (including cschem).
In the same time, I give up trying to "activate" the userbase. I have my
pcb-rnd that does exactly what I need. It would have been nice if it had
more users so more bugs could have been fixed and more features could have
been introduced, but as long as it can do what I want, my goal is
achieved. Having pcb-rnd, I don't need to worry about mainline either
(which I think is in its way drying out, because of the same user
passivity).
So I will probably announce releases, but will stop doing polls and
organizing events or finding out what users want. Generally, I will stop
spending time on anything that I don't directly need, or is not already
backed up by 5+ readily-available, active users, already organzied
together by someone else (see also:
http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd/myfeature.html ).
(This may change if I see any major change in attitudes or project
structure.)
Regards,
Igor2
P.S. thanks to those few who did spend some time testing a few things in
the past months - they found nice bugs of which a few even affected
mainline so mainline could benefit too.
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