kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[José Ignacio <jose.cyborg@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've started to see a flurry of features that are either getting rushed in
for v5.0 or being pushed aside to the future "v6" version of kicad. Due to
the limited resources of the development team and the sheer amount of work
for each major release, the development cycles get pretty long, and many
small but significant features will not see wide use until v6 will come out
in a couple of years, as new features are not allowed in bugfix releases.

Would it be possible to this week clamp down completely now on _any_ kind
of new feature for v5.0, and instead of pushing it to v6 (which sounds very
far in the future), push it instead to v5.1, which could be released just a
few months after v5.0 and include small features that don't break
compatibility in a major way. That should also ease the continual
backporting of bug fixes as the stable branch wont get overly stale, and
small convenience features will get much better testing before the rush of
the next release. IMO it will make the 5->6.0 cycle a lot less stressful
than it's been for the past two cycles.

Features in the v4->5 cycle that have forced me to use the master branch
for production are things like the eeschema field autoplacing, eeschema
field editor, gal performance improvements, STEP support. All things that
didn't really break compatibility of my projects as much as a major release
can do, but many people using the stable release haven't been able to test.

~Jose