July and August 2015 Development Summary

Work continues towards a "stable" release for 2015. It is taking longer than desired to reach a "stable" point however many developers do this in their limited spare time. We want to eliminate as many bugs as possible before declaring a "stable" point.

That being said, it is also difficult to get developers to stop trying to submit features and enhancements and focus on bugs because who doesn’t want new features and shinier interfaces? We would greatly appreciate any developers helping to fix open bugs on launchpad. The most important issues to be fixed can be found here.

Work on the push and shove (PNS) router is still ongoing with Tomasz Wlostowski and Maciej Suminski from CERN working on adding numerous improvements and bug fixes.

BZR 5897 PNS: prevent placing multiple vias in the same spot.

BZR 5899 PNS: hide cursor after inline dragging.

BZR 5860 router: improve rounding error handling in hull calculation

BZR 5858 router: more robust nearest obstacle clipping

BZR 5868 router: compute (and display) DP gap dynamically when tuning…​

BZR 5867 router: fix shortcut crash & inline dragging for inline drag…​

BZR 5866 router: compute diff pair gap on the fly when tuning the len…​

BZR 5865 router: invoke interactive drag when dragging traces/vias in…​

BZR 5863 router: support for non-90 degree pad orientations

+ many more patches

boost::polygon was formerly used for a lot of geometry related operations in the 3D Viewer and PCBNew. Unfortunately it has been slow and it is basically(though not announced) being left unmaintained. There was even a KiCad stemming issue that has been left unpatched for 2 years.

The solution has been to slowly purge the boost::polygon dependency and replace it with a C++ library called clipper

BZR 6002 boost::polygon from bitmap2component

BZR 6001 de-boostization: Fixed incorrect zone fill clearance when overlapped with another zone of higher priority.

BZR 5999 Removed all dependencies on boost::polygon except for bitmap2component. Replaced almost all instances of CPOLYGONS_LIST with SHAPE_POLY_SET.

Coverity for those of you that don’t know, is an amazing commerical static analysis tool that can find many issues in code by examining your project while it compiles. It goes far beyond what tools like cppcheck are currently capable of. Luckily its free for open source projects!

We have been using Coverity since January 2015 and correcting many of the issues it has reported. As of Sept 02, 2015, we are down to 23 remaining issues and 433 fixed issues since we started using it.

Fixes during July and August:

BZR 6078

BZR 6080

BZR 6062

BZR 6079

BZR 6093

BZR 6142

BZR 6095

Besides being impacted by the removal of boost::polygon which may offer some speed improvements. There were some other changes that should have improved the rendering speed of the 3D Viewer.

BZR 6082 Improves 3D Viewer rendering speeds

BZR 6037 Speeds up silkscreen layer generation

BZR 5852 Flips the rotate Z and Y icons which were previously flipped

BZR 6074

A few enhancements were made by Blair Bonnett to the calculator options for the Track Width tab.

This an complete list of all contributors who have submitted at least one patch from the start of July 2015 to the end of August 2015. We thank you for your contributions no matter how small.

Want your name on that list? Learn how to contribute!