kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Richard A Burton" <richardaburton@...>]

> > When a binary release is made, but who downloads binary releases of
> > open source software?
> Kicad users do.
> Debian users do.
> Ubuntu users do.
>
> Sorry, I missed your point on this one.

As I said, people who get their packages from their distribution do,
and that is the preferred way for most people. I personally don't know
many Linux users that want to download precompiled binaries for
products, that aren't shipped with their distro. Maybe that's because
I'm used to technical Linux users, as the Linux user base grows and
absorbs more Windows users perhaps this is changing.

> Statically linking is ok, it solves the problem. I understand that
> your job is made easier if we you can dynamically link. But the goals
> of this group and your goals as a debian packager are only mostly
> aligned, but not 100% aligned.

Statically linking solves the problem for one form this is distributed
in, but not for all. How many users get their copy of kicad from their
distro compared with a binary download from the kicad site? A static
linked version of kicad wouldn't be allowed in Debian, and I'm sure
the package policies of other distributions would be the same. I'm
only asking to try and keep backwards compatibility as long as
possible. There probably will come a point when it can't be, and
hopefully by that time 2.8 will be stable and included in most
distros.

> In my view, this group's goal is to push features into the product
> first. That means keeping J.P. happy and well fed, well rested and
> healthy. It also means creating an environment where others can
> contribute in a fashion similar to him.
>
> Debian packaging is a downstream task.

True, but there are a lot of people using the Debian packages, and
these people are your users as much as they are mine. Some thought
should be given to them.

As I also said, I am pushing for wx 2.8 to be included in Debian, and
if a specific decision is made to drop 2.6 compatibility then that
will actually give me ammo to use to help get it in. Who knows, it may
get in before the next official Kicad release anyway.

I doubt we have a lot of figures for number of people using Kicad,
it's hard to know with open source software. However this may be of
interest:
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=kicad

These stats are tracked by an optional package not installed by
default, and the usual estimate is that it's installed by 5-10% of
users, therefore you could estimate the number of Debian Kicad
installs is in the region 10-20 times higher than these figures.

If you're interested you can read about the issues with getting 2.8 in
Debian here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=403237

Richard.