kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jean-pierre charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 21/09/2012 17:22, Craig Southeren a écrit :
> 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?
First, thanks for your involvement in Kicad.

Yes, support for the Microsoft compiler suite is not a priority for the KiCad maintainers.
The reason is Kicad is not a tool like wxWidgets or qucs.
Therefore, generally speaking, support for many compilers is not a priority.
Having said that, testing Kicad build with other compilers than GCC is a good thing.
It gives opportunity to find some issues or weak point that do not appears with gcc.
Developers are interested in patches to allow a clean compile under Windows, Linux and MacOs.
The main reason developers are not motivated by MSVC it MSVC is not multi platform,
and therefore has no interest for us (remember Kicad runs under 3 platforms).
is short:
Developers are *very* interested in patches to allow a clean compile and fix weak points,
but do not have a great interest to fix some obscure issue specific to MSVC,
and especially do not want a lot of #ifdef MSVC in Kicad source.

Note also kicad_msvc.h is an header in Kicad that allows some specific MSVC declarations.

> 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?

I do not know if this is a good idea, but why not ?
I am not sure a pcb layer is the right support of a background bitmap.
(a layer should be plotted, or shown in 3D for instance, and board items can be added, deleted ...).
a background bitmap is more like the grid that can be shown or not, but cannot be plotted, and is not a layer.
Layers 29, 30 and 31, not yet used in Pcbnew, should be left for something related to the board.
A background bitmap is not a board item.



--
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS