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Re: gEDA-user: Reinventing the wheel

On 18/05/11 00:30, Stefan Salewski wrote:

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 23:59 +1000, Russell Shaw wrote:



Instead of blindly reinventing the wheel, i always look in detail
at what currently exists.


Maybe KiCAD is a better starting point for you?
Written in C++ with wxWidgets, it is available for multiple OS including
windows. Here in Germany KiCad is more popular than gEDA/PCB, even for
Linux users. I do not really understand this, I have never find time and
motivation to really test KiCad myself. While gEDA/PCB has some serious
users and a large list of projects done with gEDA, KiCAD users seems to
be more childreen type, making boards with a power LED and a led driver
chip...

On the KiCAD developer mailing list there is much activity, but there
are only a few really smart and active developers, so development
progress is slow. Indeed, nearly all windows KiCAD users seems to be
only consumers, without any contributions. And there is Fritzing or Qucs
-- Qucs has schematics and simulation support, but PCB backend is
missing. Once I had the strange idea to implement a PCB or schematics
mode for inkscape. Really crazy.


The problem with KiCAD is 1) C++, 2) Qt.

C++ was a *really* bad idea. Qt i don't like because it was fundamentally
architected just for the sake of hiding code from users using the MOC
preprocessor that used to be closed source. Anyway, it's C++ too.

If i got familiar enough with geda, i'd adapt it, but it's a tradeoff
of how much work it would take compared to something new. The biggest
problem is changes without affecting current users. IMO, more progress
would be made by exchanging code between separate projects.

It seems like too much redundancy to have two projects with similar
uses (which i wouldn't like), and i don't like forking either.

I'm still studying geda, but if i did some real work on it, it
would end up having an extra file format, extra guis, and a closer
sch/pcb link.


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