kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Simon Richter <Simon.Richter@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 07.12.2017 19:08, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:

> Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.  it is possible kicad could have
> different feature sets depending on the availability of dependencies on
> the target platform.  The kicad project has no control over this.  If a
> platform doesn't have dependency support for spice, they can still
> provide a kicad package without spice support.  That's better than no kicad.

Right, but we still need to give some guidance on the status of
features. As it is now, new features are introduced as default-off
"experimental" stuff that is only to be used by a select few, then at
some point we enable it for nightlies, mostly driven by availability of
dependencies and a vague feeling that features should be tested, and at
some point the feature has become something that should have been
enabled by default a long time ago (but nobody can tell the exact date
when).

We need a bit of a process here to promote feature status, e.g.

experimental	new stuff, not for general use
optional	=> add to nightlies
standard	=> enable by default
required	=> remove option

I think all the new features for v5 have reached "optional" status, and
they have been enabled in nightlies as far as possible. The next
question is whether they are "standard" and should be part of the stable
release, including questions by users and a commitment to file
compatibility. Probably yes, but this is a project management decision
that will affect requirements for patch submissions in the next release
cycle, so it needs to be an explicit decision.

   Simon

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