Mail Archives: geda-user/2017/01/07/03:26:03
Hello Sergey,
On Sat, 7 Jan 2017, Sergey Alyoshin (alyoshin DOT s AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> Hello Igor,
>
> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 6:31 AM, <gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu> wrote:
>> pcb-rnd 1.1.4 succesfully migrated to Debian testing (a.k.a. Stretch)
>> recently. This means Debian users with anything more recent than current
>> standle (Jessie) should be able to install pcb-rnd from the official repo.
>
> Description of pcb-rnd package does not mention relationship with pcb
> package, is it intentional?
pcb-rnd has added a great amount of complex, large features last year. We
also started to have our own file format. We are compatible with pcb, but
we are also compatible with kicad - there's no conceptual difference in
how we load/save a .pcb file or .kicad_pcb file. The relation of pcb-rnd
to pcb is going to be more and more similar to the relation between
pcb-rnd and kicad or other packages. From an user's perspective this means
pcb-rnd is not a geda/PCB with slightly different config and 2..3 minor
improvements (like it was in 2013), but it's more of a totally different
layout package.
In the same time much of the code has been heavily modified, reorganized,
rewritten or added newly since the fork. If you look at the code you can
still identify similar parts, but the files (organization of the code),
the APIs, the data structs changed a lot. And they are going to change
even more, as I am attacking the good old data representation design
proplems we couldn't deal with for a decade. For a few months already we
are no longer API-compatible with geda/PCB plugins. So the two projects
diverged a lot from developer's point of view as well. For a new
programmer coming to contribute, pcb-rnd is almost as different from
geda/PCB as kicad would be.
So if you mean the description doesn't have an emphasis of the history of
the project, that's intentional: we had a project rebranding a few months
back when I realized how far we diverged from geda/PCB already. Pcb-rnd
is historically a fork of geda/PCB, and if you start it up it may still
look similar for the first glance, but then tons of things differ. Thus
the emphasis on being a fork is long gone. It's not like we try to hide
this aspect, it's all in the doc, but this is no longer the main info for
new users.
Regards,
Igor2
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