kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx>]

2015-11-04 20:33 GMT+01:00  <xarx@xxxxxx>:
>> You are treating developers as a some sort of object. We
>> are people, we have lives, we do not sit here looking for work.
>
> Please, don't feel offended :-). I'm a professional developer, and I'm used to
> be treated as a "human resource". But I don't take that personally, I don't
> feel my humanity is humiliated by that.
>
>> We pick what we like to do and work on it if we have time.
>> You don't simply get developers from XYZ project to work on ABC
>> project, there is a lot of time spent relearning the codebase,
>> changing tools, etc.
>
> Of course. But if the projects cooperated, there could open more opportunity
> for the developers, and some of them might get interested. But if they are
> specialized for say QUCS, they won't contribute to other projects.

There is already a

>> That is true, but I don't see finding developers wanting to work on
>> software they will never in a billion years are going to use
>> themselves being easy. What's the point of it for them?
>
> I think, that many developers just seek for an opportunity to realize their
> ambitions somewhere. And if they saw that here is a possibility to create say
> a plugin framework  waiting just for them, they could become interested. When
> the framework gets created, they may loose interest, but the work will be
> done.

What are their amibtions? They are certainly not dictated by others.
If you want to contribute to a project as a software developer, and
don't really know what to do, you can always give the bug tracker a
look and get familiar with the particular development process used in
any given project. And then fix some bugs, or just help fixing bugs.

I think the situation you mention here with the plugin framework is
not a real situation in the scope of open source software. There are
endless possibilities. The task for any contributor is to find
something the he wants to do and find out if it fits with the project
and align with the project if it is a big work package. In the case of
misalignment, there is the risk of the work being wasted or delayed in
regard to getting merged and time has passed.

>> But that was CERN's developer roadmap which is a little out of date.
>> Right now there's a real refactoring being performed by someone.
>> And someone is adding raytracing to the viewer but that is not
>> refactoring. But theres are no 3 active refactorings.
>
> Maybe I wasn't precise, neither I have investigated what changes are being
> done in each branch. Sorry.
> But there are three branches there:
>
> lp:~mrluzeiro/kicad/kicad_new3d-viewer
> lp:~cirilo-bernardo/kicad/3drefactor
> lp:~xzcvczx/kicad/3drefactor
>
> with many commits lately. Two of them are named "refactor" and the third one
> is called "new". I wonder how these branches could be merged together. This is
> what I had in mind. Again, I didn't mean to offend or discourage you.
>
>    Martin.

Protip: When you just assume things, without really knowing it, it is
always good to be humble and note that you have not investigated the
situation in much detail. This will make people more open to what you
might have to say.