Suggestion System / Improvement System

[Welocs]

Hi,

first of all: i love how KiCad is EXPLODING <3<3<3

I know where to report bugs. But is there a general way of posting suggestions somewhere without useless flooding? Like with bug report: i can search for, if someone else has reported it yet. Is there a way to find out, whats on KiCads “ToDo” list and how to add stuff to such a list?
Is there a management system for the community?

Greets

[Piotr]

@Welocs

But is there a general way of posting suggestions somewhere

It is the same place.
You can start title with “Feature request…” but you need not to.

[Welocs]

Ok thank you. There is a post in FAQ which only relates to bug reports.
I expect KiCad users to increase, so maybe it would be usefull to create a guide or point to a guide how to create reports or request, beause also for me, it takes a lot of time to find out how to find sth. and then how to report stuff in a way, i doesn’t create a mess :D.

For developers it also would be more easy, if e.g. there would be a title syntax:
[issueType](program / category): Title
Example: [Bug] (Schematic / Bus): Bus unroll not updating, when…

Greets

[Piotr]

@Welocs

For developers it also would be more easy,

I think they organized it as they want it.

[paulvdh]

@Welocs

first of all: i love how KiCad is EXPLODING <3<3<3

Hush, don’t tell anyone.
I guess it’s another 3 to 8 years before KiCad becomes so good that ever more customers of the “big boys” programs start switching to KiCad and their revenue starts dropping enough that they’ll notice. The longer it takes for them to notice, the more panic on their side, and the more betterer for KiCad.

If you make a feature request on gitlab, then don’t add that to the title. Every new thread on gitlab will be read and categorized. At the moment there are 666 open issues with a “feature-request” label

[Welocs]

@Piotr

@Welocs

For developers it also would be more easy,

I think they organized it as they want it.

Yeah i said it wrong:
It’s not about what developers want, it’s about me/us the user to know, what the developer want.
KiCad isn’t my life, neither it is for everyone else. I still have other things to do and other hobbies as well. So for most people: if it takes too much time and it is to complicated, reports and requests will be messy. Why waste everyones time? If developers receive always the exact same pattern of information, the filtering of new request is much less time consuming.
If users see this information easy and well written on one site, they make less mistakes posting stuff. Less time searching, less time asking, less time filtering. 20 people making posts != 100+ poeple making posts.

If there is interest in improoving that, i can help.

Greets

[paulvdh]

Things like the “Epics”, “Roadmap” and “Milestones” do not see very much use on gitlab. I guess that developers are more busy with developing then with documenting details. With the 666 already open feature requests they will also be able to keep themselves busy for quite a while.

Some things you can do with a low threshold of entry is to search / find some topics that interest you and give those an extra thumbs up. You can read the topics that interst you and add some of your own ideas to them (But don’t exaggerate, posts on gitlab are posted to the developers directly).

Another subject you can help with is with testing and bug hunting. From what I understand, most developers implement new features and fix bugs without doing extensive testing. You can install a recent nightly, search through recently closed bugs / issues and verify whether they work as intended. Quite often there are some edge cases in which the fix does not work properly. In the current situation it usually takes 3 or 4 bug fix updates after a mayor release before most of the “simple bugs” are discovered and fixed. You can also get an overview of new features in: https://forum.kicad.info/t/post-v8-new-features-and-development-news/48614 (Current counter at 39 new features)

Yet another way to help is with documentation. Maybe you want to write a new chapter, or update an existing one. The current documentation for net ties is:

7.2.2. Footprint attributes

Note Mention net ties here

And that is a bit sparse.

[craftyjon]

@paulvdh

“Epics”, “Roadmap” and “Milestones” do not see very much use on gitlab. I guess that developers are more busy with developing then with documenting details

We don’t currently make much use of the epic/roadmap features because they don’t align well with how we work. We do use milestones all the time for tracking what release a change or fix made it into.