kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Vesa Solonen <vsolonen@...>]

/* RANT
Past few days show a rather interesting phenomena on the list.

First there is no discussion what so ever about new zoom factor even 
though the code was there a good time before. I go rummaging code around 
for a while as the lack of feature busg me. Codebase quite unknown to me 
ans not too much skills doing C++ brings nothing, but urge to ask.

I go and ask for adding intermediates with 1.5 factor to existing ones, 
but realize soon that alternating 1.5 and 1.33 (15/10 and 20/15) makes a 
jumpy zoom.

I go and device a way to get non jumpy zoom _and_ using existing factors 
to make people used to them happy, but implementation has a bit too much 
granularity that is easily corrected. The working solution is presented 
and some background (theory) explained.

Other, almost as good solution is presented. It scraps the old factors as 
we are "coming from" there, so no need to preserve them. No other 
reasoning why. Good pushing that tries to prove all reasoning for the 
other solution redundant and unneeded. No facts, just feelings.

More through reasoning towars a general solution. Just because it was 
somewhat fun to present examples from other fields of use.

The almost as good solution gets pushed without any real discussion, with 
'Just because I say so' attitude.

Some very general comments here and there aroud the subject.

Finally the _first_, hastily proposed system gets pushed forward, because 
there is nothing better yet. As if there isn't...

What's the ROI (return of investment)? Everyone will have to calculate 
that oneself. But costs were at least some bad publicity, bad discussion 
that turned to a case of prestige without any factual arguments, wasted 
bytes and some bad mood, verb for that particular is 'vituttaa' in 
finnish. Oh, and everyone ends patching ones own compile and distro users 
think it's just bad.

What we got as return? Jumping zoom.

END RANT */

The above may be part of the reasons some have said (in personal mail) 
that they rather not discuss on kicad-devel or take any other activity 
regarding Kicad.

Look on the bright side, I'm not that easy to scare off.

-Vesa