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Mail Archives: geda-user/2016/07/16/13:53:20

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Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 19:59:43 +0200 (CEST)
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
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From: gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu
Subject: Re: [geda-user] [pcb-rnd] code & test sprint - the future of
pcb-rnd
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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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