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How to join coralEDA

1. What do you get?

As a developer of a tool that tries to solve one part of the problem properly, the ecosystem offers the rest of the toolchain your users will need. This includes a full EDA suite, Ringdove, including schematics capture, PCB layout editor, gerber/excellon/gcode/etc viewer.

So if you have a software that solves a problem in the EDA domain but it needs a schematics or a PCB layout as input and you do not want to write a full schematics/PCB editor, you should consider joining the coralEDA effort and get those parts for free.

Optionally you can request free-of-charge VCS, web, mailing list and IRC hosting for your project on the repo.hu infrastructure.

2. What does it cost you?

The ecosystem model has two rings or tiers, a tight and a loose. In the tight tier, tools have to spend some development time on implementing interfaces (mainly file format support) so they can communicate to other software in the ecosystem. We have a format designed specifically to make this process as cheap as possible.

2.1. joining the loose roing

In the loose tier, you don't need to do much, your tool is dragged into the ecosystem by other tools being able to communicate to it.

2.2. requirements for the tight ring

Any project that joins the tight ring must meet a few requirements:

• software quality requirements:
  • must have a suitable open source license
  • must be actively maintained
  • must have stable source releases (yes, tarballs)
  • reasonable dependencies
  • coralEDA preference is on small, focused-on-one-task projects; there is no certain size limit, but 2 million SLOC projects are likely to be on the 'too large' side.
  • transparency: development must happen in publicly accessible version control system; users must be able to follow development "real time" (no private branches worked on for months or years then published once)
• cooperation requirements:
  • must have at least one practically usable connection (work-flow) to at least one project that is already the tight ring of coralEDA
  • a maintainer must be subscribed to the coral-dev mailing list, react on collaboration requests from other tight ring project maintainers...
  • ... and must be willing to put in some effort (coding in their project) for improving interconnections within the coralEDA effort

3. Is it exclusive?

No. You can join while being part of other efforts. A whole EDA suite or random subprojects of an EDA suite can also join. The idea is that the ecosystem provides a group of tools that work together - it doesn't affect other aspects of the tools.

4. How to join

Drop me a mail at coraleda [at] igor2.repo.hu or visit our IRC channel.

5. More to read

• our optional interchange format for the tight ring tools: tEDAx
• prior art: edacore (details on how the ecosystem idea differs from edacore and why it would work out better)
• how it is being done
• genxproj interfacing requirements