kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here's my musing on the subject ( which we'll have to visit after a
stable release ):

Firstly, the version control system - any distributed system is fine
really for me. bzr is not dead - it works. I find git a pain on the
command line, but it's as powerful as it is confusing to use - it's
just another learning curve. Changing VCS doesn't really give us much
gain or loss as far as I can see.

As I remember, the last change was more moving to Launchpad from
Sourceforge. That made sense, at the time Launchpad was awesome, the
ability to browse the code repository and generate html diff views in
Launchpad was amazing and Sourceforge couldn't offer anything like the
functionality. Launchpad also came with good issue tracking.

It appears we're thinking that Launchpad is open and free software. I
disagree with that because of pages like this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/786212

We could never transition to our own hosted version because it's nigh
on impossible to setup your own.

We also use Confluence on kicad-pcb.org - it's not particularly nice
tbh. These days a bootstrap style site for the project works better
really. But someone else is providing the horse power for that site
and it's their chosen platform. Thanks very much to them for getting
on with it and providing us with something! My available time these
days is approximating 0!.

I've contributed to a couple of small projects recently on Github to
see what the usability is like and it's absolutely incredible! I'd be
hard pushed to find anything that didn't work as it should. Pull
requests were a joy to use and extremely interactive without any
effort. I think it was a record time between generating a request and
the code being in the project. You're able to converse on there very
easily with nothing seemingly getting in your way, cross referencing
commits, branches and pretty much anything is possible without effort.

At the moment I think that not being on Github is costing us a large
developer audience. However, I also appreciate the pain it would be to
make the switch!!

Best Regards,

Brian.