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Re: Kicad 6 API

 

On 2020-07-15 12:51, Conrad Wood wrote:
On Wed, 2020-07-15 at 13:53 -0400, Mark Roszko wrote:

They should be contributing to KiCad first ;)
These plans for separation have been around for years, the problem is
the amount of devs is limited and their time even more so. It is
an open source volunteer effort after all.

Isn't that a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation?

I mean, it's fairly hard to start contributing to KiCad due to its
complexity. (at least that is my impression - but then I might just be
stupid :) )
IMHO, splitting it up would lower the entry barrier to new-comers.

I'd be more than happy to contribute, but clearly I can't just "split
out bits into a library" on my own w/o discussion and consensus. That
_has_ to be a team effort, right?

The chicken/egg analogy is spot on. Despite the complexity, we have both chickens and eggs. This happens by changing small things at a time.

If you would like to contribute to KiCad, you should start small. Pick an area of the program that you are interested in and find the bug reports relating to it. Then figure out why it is broken and write a patch to fix it.

After you do a few of these and they are accepted, you will gain familiarity with how the codebase is meant to work. At that point, you might look at some of the wishlist items in the tracker that relate to the area you have picked.

This will ease you into how the system works and ensures that your first patches are small enough that you can learn how the team works and what we expect in the code contributions.

We are never going to support folks doing fundamental/structural work who aren't established contributors. It is counterproductive to the success of the project. I hope that you will choose to begin contributing. We will work with you to help you get started. The smaller the first issue you tackle, the easier it will be for you. We tag issues in our database with the label "starter" to identify those issues we think newcomers will have the easiest time addressing.

Best-
Seth

Seth Hillbrand
KiCad Services Corporation
https://www.kipro-pcb.com
+1 530 302 5483 | +1 212 603 9372


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