kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Craig Southeren <craigs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To all,
    I've been using KiCad for about a year, but as a developer and Open 
Source guy I am
seeking to contribute something back to the community in the way of 
tested code patches.
Pithy comments in the bug tracker don't convey intent properly, so here 
is my humble attempt
to say some things in a more appropriate venue and style.

1) Many thanks to Dick Hollenbeck and the KiCad developers for creating 
and excellent software suite
and running a great Open Source project. It's evident that a lot of hard 
work has been put into it.
This work is greatly appreciated

2) I'm getting the impression that support for the Microsoft compiler 
suite is not a priority for the KiCad
maintainers in any way. Fair enough - I'll stop submitting MSVC specific 
patches.

3) I've used kicad-winbuilder extensively but it hides all of the 
warnings unless you go looking for them
There are few that could be fixed - are the KiCad maintainers interested 
in patches to allow a clean
compile on Windows using MinGW?

4) I am working on additions to pcbnew that allow the use of one or two 
bitmap underlays for
assisting in layout. I'm using this to bring some old vintage computer 
designs back to life, but they
could be just as useful when trying to fit a PCB into a complex 
mechanical layout. I guess these
are similar to Clive Nicolson's "reversepcb" code but my patches fully 
integrate the functionality
into layers 29 and 30. If you don't turn on these layers in the layer 
management dialog, then
the functionality is completely turned off.

Is this of interest to anyone?

   Craig