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Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:21:06 +0100
Message-ID: <CANqhZFxYH+Y5U1ai7ey-s+4nz6eYDM2vx3aMDb7WuigNXmi4AQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: [geda-user] The state of gEDA/gaf (Was gEDA/PCBs diversity, Was: Pin hole size)
From: Gareth Edwards <gareth AT edwardsfamily DOT org DOT uk>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

Hi DJ, all,

(I realise this thread is about gEDA/PCB but I'm going to hijack it to
discuss something that's been on my mind for a while...)

On 25 October 2012 02:50, DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> I've been pretty lenient with accepting new committers.  It can't be
> worse than what we had before (few/no committers).

I think that's true for gEDA/PCB, but  gEDA/gaf appears to be close to
abandonware right now. Stable 1.8 was kicked around almost a year ago
then silence. Of the current committers, only Edward and Krzysztof
have been in any way active since February.

4 out of the 6 commits since February have been for the new print
tool, not in the core of the code. Meanwhile, myself and others have
been posting patches and pull requests to git repos to Launchpad for
some months now [for example,:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/geda/+bug/926456 from Kai-Martin
https://bugs.launchpad.net/geda/+bug/934934 from Juergen Harms
https://bugs.launchpad.net/geda/+bug/1004757 from Jim Mallatt
A bunch of fixes from issues flagged by coverity at
https://github.com/gareth8118/geda-gaf/tree/coverity-fixes

]

I'm guessing that Peters B and C have other priorities right now,
which is fair enough considering what they've put into the project,
but we don't have any ability to fill the huge gap they have left
behind - we have a chicken and egg problem where those with the talent
may not be motivated to put the effort in to improve the code or even
triage bugs and patches if they think there is no way to get the
contributions and fixes into the code base.

This is too good a toolkit to be left to rot.

Gareth