kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Povilas Kanapickas <povilas@xxxxxxxx>]

> Realisation of it all will just need enormous amount of work and some
> more than a couple of persons. Searching developers list for library
> will yield some previous discussions about the subject, also reading
> kicad-lib-committers [1] archives might be of help.

I assume you are talking about main task of creating an extensive, high
quality library. If this is the case, I agree with your assessment:
doing the "extensive and high quality" parts is a gigantic task, quite
likely out of reach of what we can do in a reasonable timeframe. That's
why my ideas in the original post do not try to solve the issue
directly: it's hardly possible.

Fortunately, we can restate our problem. "Too much work" is an
expression of "not enough manpower". There's high chance that the latter
can be solved -- after all, every KiCad user is a potential contributor
of his own footprints and symbols. What we need is to somehow induce the
users to contribute. This can be done by advertising the possibility of
contribution and lowering the barrier of entry. The great thing is that
both of these are quite within our capabilities.

To sum up, what I want to do is to lower the barrier of entry as much as
possible, even with short term negative consequences. If I'm successful,
I'm pretty sure that it's only a matter of time when we have a central
repository we can only dream of now.

> We should also take this discussion to kicad-lib-committers where it
> belongs.

I'd like to keep it here for now as the discussion involves both the
library and the application (new library format). In particular, I'd
like to hear what the core KiCad developers think about my ideas. The
entire proposal depends on what they say :-)

Regards,
Povilas Kanapickas