PCB history

The "CVS" days (2003..2008)

I've probably forgotten some other big things and so I am not trying to ignore contributions from others. A lot of years have gone by!

The first thing I found [in late 2002 after trying PCB again] was that there were many different patches floating around the internet and there seemed to be no real organization to those. Also pcb still used the X imake based build system which was well on its way to being obsolete and certainly lacked the flexibility that one would want.

In early 2003, I approached harry Eaton to seek his permission/blessing to import PCB into CVS hosted on sourceforge so we could have a central place to apply patches from different sources. My vision was we'd make 3-4 snapshot releases per year and the releases would largely be time driven and not feature driven. The goal was to unify efforts and have timely snapshot available but also recognized that we likely didn't have a large enough developer base to have more serious release testing along with maintained release branches like you might have in a large project.

From my point of view, the big items in the 2003 to more recent history were:

• I imported harry's last release into CVS on sourceforge, applied a number of patches from the internet and implemented an automake/autoconf based build system
• harry (I think it was harry) changed the internal resolution to be much smaller. The resolution back in early 2003 may have been find in the DIP/leaded device days but was quickly becoming too coarse for more modern packages.
• Bill Wilson implemented a GTK gui, replacing the Athena Widget based GUI which was really aging.
• DJ did the HID refactoring core work which allowed having the choice between GTK and Motif/Lesstif toolkits and perhaps more importantly a more modular way to have extra backends. I did some of the GTK work associated with this (my vague memory was it was things like the export dialog) and either DJ or Bill did a bunch on the drawing canvas part.
• The footprint library still has a ways to go but over the years we really have filled in a lot of pretty useful stuff. ~geda library has IPC based 3-tier footprints for most of the standard 2-pin passives. We have good footprints for SOIC, QFP, TQFP, QFN, etc. and others.
• Peter Clifton's GL and 3D stuff I think never quite made it into the main code base unfortunately. I'm hoping that may still happen.
• Tons and tons of bug fixes.
• DJ took the lead to make the file format section of the manual be driven by comments embedded in the parser code. For the first time I think we actually had accurate docs. I did a fair amount of work in other parts of the manual too.

I've been relatively inactive for some time now due to keeping quite busy with work and 3 kids. Doesn't leave much time for open source software projects. I made a geda+pcb base board earlier this year for the first time in probably 6 years. My oldest [child] has an interest in us building some analog synthesizer projects so I may find myself being a user a little bit more.