kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On Nov 12, 2014, at 8:57 AM, Joel Holdsworth <joel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 
>> If I thought for a second that a large number of our primary
>> developers were going to exit the project because we weren't using
>> git, then I would pull the trigger right now.  I seriously doubt that
>> bzr is much of a sticking point for most developers.  If this is not
>> the case (all you primary developers and you know who you are),
>> please let me know so I can make an informed decision.
> 
> Sure your current crop have settled with the workflow, but there will be
> developer turnover. Therefore there is a need to attract new developers.
> Because I think we all want the project to grow, and be long lived, and
> achieving that is all about reducing barriers to entry.

I contribute to the project mostly by testing builds on OS X, not necessarily fixing bugs I find. I'm a hardware/FPGA guy, and I also do a lot of embedded C on 8051 and ARM. I am not an application-level programmer. I also use Subversion for my home projects and my company has recently migrated from VSS (!?@!*$) to SVN. That move seems to be working well for us, since we have no need for distributed development.

Having said that, of all of the barriers to entry for new developers, I think that the choice of the version-control system isn't even on the radar. I simply downloaded bzr from Launchpad and installed it on my Macs and it does what it is supposed to do. (I think parts of it are daft, but whatever.) Any competent developer can learn a new version control system in an evening. Seems to me that understanding wxWidgets is the biggest hurdle to contributing to Kicad.

Anyways, carry on.

-a