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!