X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 19:59:43 +0200 (CEST) X-X-Sender: igor2 AT igor2priv To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Debug: to=geda-user AT delorie DOT com from="gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu" From: gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu Subject: Re: [geda-user] [pcb-rnd] code & test sprint - the future of pcb-rnd In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (DEB 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk Hi all, the session went just as expected: with no user joining. As far as I can tell after lurking at the past few pcb mainline code sprints, this is totally in-line with the user activity in pcb mainline. At least zero is a nice, round number. This made me make up my mind about future directions. Pcb-rnd reached the stage where it had all the features I ever wanted (the "Make It Work" step), a few releases ago. Now it is reaching a new level where the infrastructure in the background looks and works like how I think they should ("Make It Right"). So it's close to being "finished". Which means I should probably stop investing as much time in it as I did in the past months and move my focus on something that is more broken (gschem). Thus my next steps in pcb-rnd are: 1. I promised I'd try the user request driven way too, so I picked the "draw bus" feature from the feature poll 2. I contacted all the 4 users who signed up for testing such a feature and asked to comfirm they can spare the necessary time to keep testing up with development rate and asked them to do some initial smoke test on pcb-rnd 3. if enough of them gives positive answer I start implementing the feature with their support 4. while waiting for the answers, I am finishing the conf rewrite and roll a release. If 3. fails, I will probably switch to designing and coding cschem (a replacement for gschem and gnetlist - I'd say contribution is welcome right from the design phase, but I know how it works). If 3. works, I will try to repeat it with other top features, and spend about 1/4 time on pcb-rnd and 3/4 time on other projects (including cschem). In the same time, I give up trying to "activate" the userbase. I have my pcb-rnd that does exactly what I need. It would have been nice if it had more users so more bugs could have been fixed and more features could have been introduced, but as long as it can do what I want, my goal is achieved. Having pcb-rnd, I don't need to worry about mainline either (which I think is in its way drying out, because of the same user passivity). So I will probably announce releases, but will stop doing polls and organizing events or finding out what users want. Generally, I will stop spending time on anything that I don't directly need, or is not already backed up by 5+ readily-available, active users, already organzied together by someone else (see also: http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd/myfeature.html ). (This may change if I see any major change in attitudes or project structure.) Regards, Igor2 P.S. thanks to those few who did spend some time testing a few things in the past months - they found nice bugs of which a few even affected mainline so mainline could benefit too.