kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
>>> But I just don't like the infrastructure of the project, I view a yahoo mailing list as a lousy way to keep track of concerns like this.
>>>
>>>
>>> We need better tools people. Especially if we are ever to successfully attract, retain, and organize more developers.
>>>
>>>
>>> Has everyone had the time to review some of the tools over at Launchpad? 
>>> 
>> Dick,
>>
>> Sorry I took so long to post this but I've busy. I looked at the Launchpad tour and it looks promising. I haven't used any of these tools except Bazaar so I can't really speak to their effectiveness. I like the idea distributed version control but the last time I used Bazaar, it was slow even on a fairly modest size project that was less than one tenth the size of Kicad. I think it was around version 1.5 so things may have improved since then.
>>
>> 
>>> I know that sourceforge has recently added tons of tools also, like trac, git, bazaar, but the the tools are all un-knowledgeable of each other, not integrated with one another in the way that the tools at launchpad seem to be. 
>>>
>>> This yahoo mailing list cannot be the best we can come up with, say what you want about any other suggestions, I maintain that this yahoo mailing list is pretty inadequate in my view, especially since about 50% of the traffic on it seems to be more user centric than developer centric, and I am guilty of that also.
>>> 
>> Agreed. I think too many things get lost here. I imagine an integrated solution would work better assuming it wasn't too cumbersome to use.
>>
>> 
> 
> Launchpad has some planning tools there which allow brainstorming design 
> alternatives to be discussed along with posting example code attachments. 
> 
>>> Somebody is going to have to make some decisions if this project is ever going to get into gear. And those decisions will require volunteers to implement.
>>> 
>> This is probably the biggest stumbling block. I think most developers would prefer an easier way to communicate ideas and share code than what we are currently using. 
> 
> I agree, and I like the ability of Launchpad to support multiple source 
> trees on the project.
> 
> 
> Having a distributed version control system would also be an 
> improvement. Which is your favorite distributed version control system?

The more I mess around with it, the more impressed I am with GIT. We
know it scales well and can handle anything we can throw at it and will
be well supported for the foreseeable future. It's command line
interface has been updated to the point where using it isn't that much
different than any of the other VCSs. It has some really interesting
looking power user commands. I don't that I would ever need to use any
of them but it's nice to know they are there. I don't know if Launchpad
supports GIT directly or if their integrated tools will work with GIT.
I personally have no problems using Bazaar. It would be nice to have a
sandbox Bazaar repo of Kicad to see if the performance issues have been
addressed.

I think using a distributed VCS is the most important thing. One of the
reasons I stopped working on the drawing code was that the experimental
code I was writing was making a mess of the code base with all of the
#ifdef/#endif code. I also realized that I probably do not have the
time to do it by myself. It would be nice to create an experimental
drawing code branch and have several people pulling from multiple
developer branches as the code progress and ideas are hashed out. Once
the new drawing code was stable it could be merged into the main branch.

Wayne

> 
> 
>> Finding someone to implement and maintain it will be the hard part.
>> 
> 
> That may not be that hard if it is not a lot of work.
> 
> 
>> Wayne
>>