kicad-developers team mailing list archive

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

Just wanted to pass on a little info about usage of Kicad on Debian,
as I'm the maintainer for the package. This is just feedback, I'm not
looking for a medal ;-)

Kicad has been a standard part of the Debian distribution since the
last stable release ("etch"). Newer versions have since been packaged
and can be obtained by those using the testing & development version
of Debian (which will of course go on to be the next stable version
("lenny")). Having Kicad in Debian makes it readily available to
potential users on Linux on 15 architectures, FreeBSD on 2 and Hurd on
1.
http://www.buildd.net/cgi/package_status?unstable_pkg=kicad&searchtype=all

Now for some numbers. Package installs can be tracked by an optional
package called popularity contest, so these stats give some info but
of course only represent a portion of Debian users (probably quite a
small portion):
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=kicad
At the time of writing there are over 650 people with the package
installed, and almost a quarter of them use it regularly. See the nice
graph of installed & regular users:
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=kicad&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

Compare this to the 480 people who have the Eagle package installed
(this would include those using it as the free version, and those with
a license).

Ubuntu, which you may know, is a Debian derivative. Packages in Debian
that are not directly maintained in Ubuntu are pulled from the Debian
archive and automatically rebuilt for Ubuntu, and they maintain there
own separate usage statistics (I suspect the higher numbers mean the
popcon package is probably pushed a little harder at users):
Installs: 2388, Regular users: 272
(Just beating Eagle again at 2361/254)

So, having just spent far too much of my Christmas holiday playing
with Kicad when I should have been revising, I got the latest version
packaged and I wanted to thank all the developers for their efforts on
behalf of Debian users (myself included).

I also had a proper play with the new cmake build system and I think
it's great. After adding in the component option for the install
targets I've now switched the Debian build system to use this for
subsequent versions.

Richard.