kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Rick Walker <walker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>  I can tell you now that I will never make a single commit to the
>  stable branch, ever. 

If this is true of the whole developer group it means is that no one can
use Kicad for any serious application because the current development
branch ALWAYS has something broken and in flux. 

Without putting focus on a periodic STABLE release and some effort to
support it by bug fixing it with backpatches from the development branch,
no one can safely use Kicad for doing anything serious.  One always runs
the significant risk that something critical is totally busted,
fragmentary, in an intermediate state, or worse yet, corrupts the
design database. 

For real engineers to use Kicad rather than it just being a toy
for playing with lots of toolkits and build systems and scripting and
other cool stuff, then periodic stable releases are needed.  The end
user simply cannot be doing a rebuild every week chasing a never
converging set of busted functionality. 

I've followed this development listserv for more than a year. 
I've never seen any of the new features make it into the version of
Kicad that I use for production work.  I tried building the source
several times.  Sometimes it works, other times was a snarl of
dependencies that required packages that weren't supported by my distro. 
Some of the dependencies were in my distro but were built with the wrong
settings so Kicad couldn't build with them.  Since the Kicad team is
basically in constant fiddling mode, the build process is a moving
target.  Hence, I just stick with the same old package that seems to
work and has a stable set of bugs for which I know the work-arounds. 

kind regards,
--
Rick Walker

I've done several dozen boards in Kicad, so I am a motivated and
experienced user.  I'm able to make a go of it, but even though I got my
work team to do several boards in Kicad, they have since switched to
Allegro and abandoned Kicad.