X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Message-ID: <1436400557.676.46.camel@ssalewski.de> Subject: Re: developer excitement? was Re: [geda-user] gEDA/gschem still alive? From: Stefan Salewski To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2015 02:09:17 +0200 In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" X-Mailer: Evolution 3.12.11 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk 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?