Imported from the mailing list archives.

Dear fellow gEDA users,

pcb-rnd went a long way since I made the initial fork. Many aspects of the project have changed:

- major new features added (e.g. language-neutral parametric footprints, embedded scripting)

- major infrastructural elements rewritten (e.g. the new conf system, the new footprint system, the new plugin system)

- from a one-man show it is becoming a community effort with active users, testers and contributors; with active IRC channel, mailing list and a lot of traffic on both.

- from a developer-offer driven process we switched to an user-pull system: features and ideas are judged by how many active users request them

- with the more modular code structure we are free to incorporate strange/controversial features in optional plugins, without having to worry about interfering with users' needs

- about 1/3 of all codebase new or changed compared to the original forked material (and the rate is constantly increasing)

All in all, the project is much less of just a "fork of mainline pcb" - it has became more of an independent pcb editor that happens to share some code and history with geda/pcb. Our plans for the future is pushing the project even stronger in this direction.

This change in the image of the project should be reflected on the project page as well, so I decided to replace the old "what's different compared to mainline" page with a new, "what is pcb-rnd" page:

http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd