kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I want to get familiar with the GAL codebase, and it occurred to me that it
might be fun to play with porting GerbView to GAL.  I know it is on the 6.x
roadmap, but it seemed to me that it would be mostly not dependent on any
other changes that I see on the roadmap or have seen people talking about
on the mailing list.

- Is anyone currently working on this?

- Does anyone think it would be a bad idea for me to start working on this
now?

- If a GAL port is "feature-complete", is there any reason for the app to
retain the legacy graphics code, or can it just provide OpenGL and Cairo
backends?  My impression is the only think keeping legacy canvas in pcbnew
is feature differences between legacy and GAL, but I wanted to check if
there are other reasons.

- In my first hour of looking at the code for this, it seems like the GAL
code currently has some interdependence with pcbnew that needs to be
straightened out before using GAL in other applications.  For example,
EDA_DRAW_PANEL_GAL depends on PCB_PAINTER, not a generic PAINTER.  Is this
an open problem for anyone to tackle, or does anyone actively have plans to
refactor this?

Best,
Jon