pcb-rnd knowledge pool

Abstract: Statistics about the year: what 2017 was like in the life of pcb-rnd.

  Imported from the mailing list archives.

I'd like to thank everyone for all the support and contribution this year. pcb-rnd grew a lot - much more than I ever imagined to be possible. Now that I sat down to collect some statistics, I have to admit: objectively it grew even more than I remembered subjectively.

For those who like statistics, pcb-rnd's 2017:

• we had 7 stable releases this year, which means we produced a release about every 2nd month
• we made 7692 commits; we started from r6008 on 1st January, so we more than doubled the total number of commits of the [2013..2016] period in a single year!
• we finished the layer rewrite, implemented subcircuits, padstacks, a lot of I/O plugins (including eagle and protel and hyperlynx loaders), fixed up the gl rendering, implemented a mostly working gtk3+cairo HID and tons and tons of more improvement I don't even attempt to list
• we've introduced an entire new data model - not in "would be usable some day" branches but in production code, already tested on a few boards fabbed
• 2 and a half of "The Big Three" problems got solved: debian packaging and opengl support almost fully; and we made some progress with the documentation too; (The Big Three problems got mapped mid 2016)
• we have 17 developers/contributors with svn write access; 13 of them commited to the svn this year; top 8 by number of commits: Igor2, avigne, erich, miloh, wojciechk8, ade, koendv, efoss. But let's not forget about those contributors who do not commit to svn but provide very important testing and feedback.
• we exchanged 764 emails on this mailing list
• we have 34 subscirbers on the mailing list
• on IRC, we do a few dozen kilobytes of relevant traffic every day - it's not archived yet so I can't provide better stats, but we usually have 10..15 users connected, 2/3 of them active (talk at least once a week)
• our support is still high quality: we still manage to react on many bugreports within 8..48 hours, providing a fix or workaround
• the sponsoration project grew incredibly fast: we had 13 sponsored days this autumn and it seems we can keep up this rate for the next year
• project infrastructure upgrades: knowledge pool ("wiki"), public mailing list archives, properly edited and narrated tutorial videos
• sister projects booted: edakrill, cschem and genxproj; specified netlist and footprint format in tEDAx (supported by pcb-rnd and gschem)
• project strategy brought to the next level: we have left gEDA and we are going to boot up the "FOSS EDA ecosystem" the upcoming years
• compared to gEDA/PCB or our ex-parent-umbrella-project gEDA, we managed to show constant activity, larger at a magnitude or more than all the rest of the code gEDA projects combined; we managed to grow our community while keeping it all productive and friendly (not importing the problems from geda-user@); we managed to fix many decade old design flaws that won't be addressed in PCB any time soon; and all these big changes without introducing noticably more bugs than mainline has.

Generally speaking, I believe our developer/contributor/user activity, especially the rate of (total activity) / (total number of users) is in par with the biggest EDA projects, including KiCad.

Let us continue doing exactly the same that we did in 2017, and 2018 will be a very productive year as well!