kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/20/21 11:02 AM, RigoLigo RLC wrote:
> 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?

Yes. There is one major (the new Python API) and a few minor exceptions
still outstanding.  The new icon set code was on the feature freeze
exception list maintained by the lead development team.  I believe I
mentioned that there were a few exceptions that were outstanding when I
made the feature freeze announcement.  If I didn't, my bad.

The string freeze will be announced as soon as all of the exceptions
have been committed and the code base has stabilized.

> 
> 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?

All known reproducible crash bugs must be fixed before RC1 can happen
but yes hard to reproduce bugs are always going to slow things down.

> 
> 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?

There most likely will not be point version releases but the lead
development team has discussed smaller change sets and possibly an
annual release schedule to lower the time between releases so that is a
likely possibility.

- Wayne

> 
> I'd like to know from you guys.
> 
> Rigo
> 
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