kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with all of this 100%.

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 11:45:58AM -0600, José Ignacio wrote:
> 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