kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[RigoLigo RLC <rigoligo03@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have a few questions about the current KiCad development.

1. new features after feature freeze?

Most significantly, the separate icon set. While everyone is looking
forward to having this small feature, it's still kinda offending the term
feature "freeze". Though we weren't at string freeze, new features are
already annoying enough to translators. Are we getting other features
before V6 launch?

2. unresolved mysterious crashes

Many (or most) critical/high priority issues are unresolved crashes,
usually hard to reproduce, without need-info tag. Are they slowing down the
version iteration? I mean, KiCad crashes are not new, not to mention those
that are hard to tackle. Reducing data loss with autosave and such would be
enough for current status of KiCad IMO. Of course crashes that have known
reasons must be fixed. But what are we going to do with these mysterious
crash issues? Wait till they're resolved before we launch RC1?

3. Development iteration...

Currently KiCad will push big version leaps for all the features developers
add into it. I know it's got reasons (difficulty of maintaining two
branches, plugin API consistency) but a big leap requires a LONG wait. For
OSS users this might not be a big problem but in Chinese community there
are companies that use KiCad as alternatives. They dare not to use
nightlies(even it's stable, it's not a stable release, and files are
incompatible), but are still eager to have nice new features. Will we get
more frequent updates like 6.1 6.2 adding small features step by step
instead of doing all the things in one milestone?

I'd like to know from you guys.

Rigo