kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 4 February 2014 13:04, Joel Holdsworth <joel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Thank you all for taking the time to respond to my original e-mail. It
> seems to me that whatever the outcome this discussion it is well worth
> having.
>
>
> On 04/02/14 11:57, Brian Sidebotham wrote:
>> I suspect it's all just a documentation issue too as someone else
>> suggested because it's so easy to branch the code and generate a
>> patch using Bazaar.
>
> Agreed, as James Hagerman put it....
>
> "The KiCad website and KiCad Launchpad page are full of broken or
> misleading links to old, outdated, or conflicting information.
> Binaries (and libraries) for all platforms are not readily available
> on either site."
>
> I found that to be true for myself. For example I spent a lot of time
> trying to get the adamwolf PPA to work for me - but it's hopelessly
> out of date.

Unfortunately, everyone is trying their best - but we're struggling
for resource. The codebase has been extremely volatile lately with
regards to adding in dependencies, there's been a great effort by a
lot of people to keep build systems working and stable, but it's a
large task and may not settle down for a while yet as KiCad moves
through some pretty major changes.

> It wouldn't take much effort to fix this, just a bit of polish;
> sorting through what is current, and what is out of date.
>
>> Perhaps the best place for anyone who has decided Bazaar is dead
>> (it works for me by the way!) and therefore cannot contribute (and
>> particularly git fans) is to look at the Inkscape wiki
>
> As I said, of course Bazaar still works - Hell CVS still works! But
> that doesn't mean it would be doing you any favors if you stuck with a
> CVS workflow. That's my point - it's a loss of opportunity.
>
> I do hope someone brings Bazaar back on track - truly! Competition in
> this space is good and healthy. But what do you think? Do you think
> that's likely? I hope to be wrong, but I suspect I won't be. And there
> are some big warning signs: emacs switching away from it, the loss of
> developer mind-share, stalled development - these are quite serious,
> and so I'd recommend taking care not to dismiss them to lightly.
>
> Let me ask - do you think Bazaar has a bright future at this point?

I don't consider Bazaar to be "off-track" I guess, and my workflow
sits in with Bazaar commands easily. So it's future is exactly the
same as it's present state, even if there is never another commit to
it - it does what is needed for me at least.

...snip...

> There are a couple of things I'd like to have also. Are these things
> possible? ....

I sent the other link very much on purpose, as on that page, a few
paragraphs in is a link to this page:
http://www.inkscape.org/en/develop/using-git-repositories/

in other words, fill your boots, work with Git on the KiCad codebase
if you want, there should be nothing stopping you. Yes, we could
document this feature ourselves, but none of the lead developers (as
far as I'm aware) use git-bzr-ng for developing with git branches.

You should find that any of your preferred Git workflows are possible
using git-bzr-ng. If you have the time, please try the git workflow
and see if it does work for you. If it does, then great - we can make
a big song and dance about it and let everyone know that they can
develop with Git workflows, it would be valuable information for us!

I agree the website could do with some updates, the sourceforge link
is dead, the freshmeat link is meaningless, the developers page is
out-of-date, etc. We're doing our best, but need more help with things
such as documentation and website maintainence, etc. It's a struggle
to find time to write any actual code!

Just email a unified patch per feature (preferably not a patch set,
because they're harder to review quickly) to the developers list
starting the subject with PATCH:

Thank-you for your interest, and taking the time to join the
developers list and discuss...

Best Regards,

Brian.