Re: gEDA-user: rant: pcb print from command line

[Jared Casper <jaredcasper@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 5:06 PM, Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Here's an example of a place where extra help wouldn't have needed any
> knowledge of internals.  Over the years there have been various bug reports
> about some of the footprints that ship with pcb.  For each of those, the
> process becomes
>

Since footprint bugs take so long, maybe some triage is necessary.   I
think it make sense for you developers to make a footprint category,
plop all of these in there and concentrate on pruning the list of bugs
that require a developer to handle.  (I agree with the idea that has
been posted here before that a symbol/footprint/model/etc. library for
gEDA should be a separate project altogether)

I think it would help to organize the bugs in there. Currently there
are 140 open bugs, most without a category, no groups used, and all
priority 5.  I can imagine for a developer it just looks like a
mountain of sludge that would take a lunch break just to start on
something.  The tracker would probably be more useful and thus used
more if it were more manageable.  Well defined categories, groups and
priorities would go a long way.

Given access I'll try to make some time start trudging through and
cleaning the trackers up, but can't do much myself as is.

> Another example is when a new HID is added.  Almost no existing code is
> touched.  However, it needs to be built.  Code needs to be checked for
> formatting (run through indent(3)), compiler warnings checked, basic

Does PCB and/or gEDA have a coding style preference, let alone one
documented somewhere?

> author didn't provide that, etc.  I spent probably 2 hours today (my entire
> lunch and a chunk of my evening) on a single patch submission to get it to
> where I didn't feel bad about it.  At this rate, it would take me a month of

And now PCB has a gcode exporter.  Sweet! :)

> full time work to get through the bug and patch database....  I went ahead
> and did it on this one, but in general, it would have been useful to have
> extra hands to do some of these checks and to help out the author (whose
> work I really appreciate, this email is not meant to complain since he put
> in a lot of work already).
>

... so for the patches that you can't put so much time into, just a
comment to say what needs to be done before it gets applied would go a
long way.  The submitter has most likely spent enough time on the
patch that they probably won't mind spending another hour or two doing
the necessary grunt work to get it included in the main repository.

Jared


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