[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#885195: Bug#885195: Bug#885195: geda-gaf: please migrate to guile-2.2

[Bdale Garbee]

أحمد المحمودي <aelmahmoudy at users.sourceforge.net> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 08:48:59PM -0600, Bdale Garbee wrote:
>> As far as I'm concerned, you can feel free to remove geda-gaf from Debian.
>> 
>> I'm personally quite happily living on the fork that I've packaged of
>> lepton-eda.  Lepton-eda is very actively maintained and improved, and
>> while there's a recent new release of geda-gaf, I'm not likely to spend
>> any more time working on the geda-gaf packaging.
> ---end quoted text---
>
> Aren't there any features in gEDA 1.10 that aren't present in Lepton
> EDA?

That's a reasonable question.  I haven't looked much at gEDA since
moving to lepton-eda, so I'm probably not the right person to answer
this question.  However... 

The lepton-eda fork came into existence at least in part due to the
messy integration of xorn (python extension language support) into
gEDA.  So, almost by definition, anything related to python as an
extension language exists in gEDA but not in lepton-eda.

By contrast, the lepton-eda code started with a fork of gEDA just before
the xorn merge, and has doubled-down since on using guile for as much as
possible.  I'm personally happy coding in guile and contributed a tEDAx
export module to lepton-eda so that I can easily use it with pcb-rnd.

From a practical standpoint, 1.10 is the first new gEDA release in a
very long time, and it still build depends on guile-2.0 (caring for
guile clearly isn't a priority).  On the lepton-eda side, the core 
team is quite active (new commits in the git repo almost every day), has
made multiple stable releases since I started packaging it in August of
2018 (1.9.4 to 1.9.10), and they cheerfully did the work to move from
guile-2.0 to 2.2 when I pointed out this was going to become an issue
for Debian. 

As a *user*, I'm happily using lepton-eda almost daily, for all of my
circuit board design work.  That includes ongoing maintenance and support
of designs that I started with geda-gaf.

So... while I'm sure gEDA could be "saved" in Debian with enough effort,
I just don't see the point, and won't put any time or attention on it
myself.   

Bdale
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