pcb-rnd devlog

Burried/blind via poll

by Igor2

Results

I received 10 full answers to the poll - thanks everyone who answered. This is a small sample, but this is the best I could get (I can't reach more pcb users).

Raw results are available in html, tsv and csv format.

My interpretation

(User obviously means "those users who answered the poll")

1. only half of the users would consider even trying pcb-rnd for blind/burried vias
2. there was only one user who'd consider switching to pcb-rnd for blind-burried vias - this feature doesn't seem to be valuable enough to attract users (details below)
3. about half of the users need blind/burried via; when they do, they don't use pcb
4. 9 out of 10 users runs PCB on Linux

My conclusions

Because of 1. and 2., pcb-rnd doesn't seem to need blind/burried vias. The purpose of question 7 was to find out whether users value this feature high enough to actually consider investing time/effort in return, compared to question 6. This pair of questions was designed to avoid noise that comes from the fact that we, on the list tend to express our opinions in vast crowds while only a few invest more time than talking and do actual work. According to the result of line 7, my conclusion is that it's absolutely not blind/burried vias that potential pcb-rnd users need. Thus my decision is that I won't spend time on this feature in the near future.

The situation for pcb might be different, tho. I worded the first 4 questions to find out how strong the need is among the users of mainline pcb and whether they are devoted to pcb or choose the tool according to the design requirements. There seems to be a correlation between having to use blind/burried vias and using other layout tools. Or in other words: those who are happy with pcb usually don't need or want blind/burried vias anyway and those who do have already switched to another tool.

This suggests mainline pcb could benefit from burried/blind vias. However, the demand is much lower than "every new design needs this" or "no new user would consider pcb because of this missing feature".

Linux: it seems pcb power users mostly use Linux. I am not sure if it's because PCB works well on Linux and is a bit harder to compile on anything else - or the other way around (Linux users are more attracted to PCB).