I need to reply in pieces. Here's the first. On Sunday 11 November 2007, Peter Clifton wrote: > > If we don't develop more actively, we'll be overtaken > > by others, or our various forks. > > Forks are bad.. how to drive forwards in the core > > project? Can we define what gEDA "is" / "isn't", so that it > > becomes clearer what changes are in the right direction? > > Steve Meier's fork: > > I think there are some nice ideas here. > > Does it serve us for this to exist as a separate > > project? Can we bring parts of that back into gEDA? > > Design?, Implementation? > > Would Steve help? > > Would Steve switch back to gEDA, or continue with > > the fork? Bernd Jendrissek: > > If we don't look at his patches, I feel this is > > rapidly going to become a fork / unmergable mess like with > > Patrick B. When I looked at this before, I wasn't really > > sure what I thought. I don't recall much feedback from > > anyone. Is there room for all those wanting to develop in > > radical ways to continue in the gEDA core? > > Is gEDA doing something wrong (or right), causing so > > many people to end up forking it?
This is one reason for the gnucap plugin system. -- to avoid forks and encourage development. With a monolithic architecture, the person in control must make decisions about what to accept and what not to accept. Often this can result in either acceptance of bad work, or hurt feelings. The work might not be bad on its own, and often might seem to be good at the time, but upsets the future of the project. With a minimal core and almost everything in plugins, it becomes a non-issue. Everything can be accepted as a plugin, even code that is known not to work, as long as it is represented correctly and distributed separately. So, I recommend that soon after the gnucap plugin system is available in a stable release and proven, other programs affiliated with gEDA should consider a move to a similar system. But wait for gnucap to work the bugs out. _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
