kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> Mateusz wrote:

<<< snipped >>>

> In the mean time, it would be helpful for us to put on our user's hats 
> and try and agree on what is wrong with Kicad part management from a 
> user perspective. If we cannot agree on what is wrong as users, we will 
> never agree on what a fix looks like.
> 
> 
> So what is wrong *from a user perspective* ?
> 
> 
> The original user posting stated he wanted to be able to easily modify 
> the stock libraries, and that to do so he had to copy them to a 
> different place. Well this mis-understands the entire Kicad 
> philosophy. New parts go into your personal library, but you can edit 
> an existing part as a starting point. So I don't even agree with the 
> original poster from last year.
> 
> Only after we can reach agreement on what is wrong, is there any point 
> in talking about file formats and databases, which are solutions.

The classic cart before the horse analogy. We really need to do a
better job of defining the user requirements before implementing any new
feature. I recently had a coworker comment on how bad the colored
dialog button text and design of some of the dialog boxes in the current
release version looked. Granted, a lot of this has been fixed in the
current development version which is great for those users who are
developers but is of little benefit to end users. This tells me that we
need to do a better job of making the current features more usable and
getting the fixes to the end user before adding more features.

Wayne

> Solutions should be brought in only after problems are identified, 
> enumerated, and documented in a safe persistent place.
> 
> Dick