kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Alex G." <mr.nuke.me@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/24/2013 03:41 PM, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> 
> On Jul 24, 2013 3:05 PM, "Alex G." <mr.nuke.me@xxxxxxxxx
>>
>> P.S. I can't emphasize enough how much I like the new rendering modes.
> 
> To hear this is good news, I have yet to spend this time to review the
> intermediary work.  But I am extremely happy to hear that someone finds
> this massive body of work promising.
> 
> I think your opinion of "releases" may be overrated however.  What is a
> release wrt kicad?  Its fools gold IMO. Just use your own build, you
> obviously know how to build it.
> 
A "release" or "stable branch" in distro packager terms is code that the
developers, to the best of their ability certify is stable and good for
production use. In fact distros have specific guidelines about not
packaging "development" code. What this usually means is distros want a
tarball without the terms "rc", "nightly", "devel", "alpha", "beta", etc
(a release). If that is not available, distros are also willing to
accept a snapshot of the repository, but strongly encourage
(gun-aimed-to-your-head type encouragement) a "stable" branch is packaged.

What this usually means is, as long as GAL is just another branch, it
won't get into the hands of the majority of users.

There are also a few "things" that make merging GAL non-trivial. First
of all, the tools do not (yet) work in OpenGL/Cairo modes. This will
require a smarte(er) merge strategy. In merge ASCII art, it would look
something like:

 - (devel)     |-----------------------------------*----------------
               |                                  /
 - (gal_merge) |      *---(make tools work, etc) *
               |     /
 - (gal)       |----*------(continue normal GAL cycle)-------------

(You'll need to read this in monospace for it to make sense)

Now this requires some work. I am not qualified to operate the Kicad
source tree, but I'm willing to bet it should be doable in a reasonable
timeframe.

Is it worth it? I vote "yes".

> I regret ever creating the stable release.  It is simply fools gold. 
> The testing tree almost always has fewer bugs simply because they get
> fixed faster.
> 
As a Fedora package maintainer, I can vouch that lacking a stable branch
would be a headache hell for a packager. A stable branch prevents cases
where a deadly bug is introduced, and very quickly fixed, but a distro
taking the source snapshot right in-between. Fool's gold or not, it
serves its purpose.
DISCLAIMER: I am not involved in packaging Kicad for Fedora.

Alex