On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, DJ Delorie wrote: > >> DJ, so a slowly growing base is more preferable to a rapidly growing >> user base and I should not try encourage people to give gEDA a try >> on a wholesale level ? > >It depends. For example, getting a school, classroom, or other >organization to try it as a group is different than getting the same >number of people to try it individually. As a group, they can work >together to solve many of their individual problems and share >solutions, feeding only the worst problems to us.
I did exactly this a year ago and will do it again this semester. My "input" is mechanical engineer students who choose to take an exotic tour in electronics (very basic, blinking leds, a PIC hooked on serial line of the PC doing something simple, etc). I use gschem, xgsch2pcb and pcb on Debian/GNU Linux for these. My experience is that for average students the UI itself is less problematic than a non-windows system. I'm lucky because these guys haven't used other EDA tools before so it's not like they expect some sort of UI "standards", however they usually have experience with 2 or more mechanical engineering CAD software. My experience about the developers and gEDA community in general is positive. Whenever I asked for a feature or submitted a patch, sooner or later it was done in the repository. I have only one pending feature request which keeps me back from finishing my scripting plugin for PCB :) Igor2 _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
