[Arm-netbook] KiCAD autorouter freeroute has gone open source and stand alone

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

.. so i press wrong buttons, argh :) ok i think i have it now...

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 8:30 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> apologies top post no mouse right now
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On Mon, 11 May 2015 07:44:16 +0000
>> joem <joem at martindale-electric.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> KiCAD autorouter freeroute has gone open source and stand alone
>>>
>>>
>>> For Ubuntu 12.04, install the default-jdk i.e.
>>>  sudo apt-get install default-jdk
>>>
>>> The freeroute files can be downloaded from here:
>>> https://github.com/nikropht/FreeRouting/
>>
>> Finally something refreshing among all those boring news on pseudo-open
>> hardware. If only KiCad itself was getting UI improvements so all the
>> pseudo-openhardware arduinish crowd was really ashamed to use non-open
>> tools...

 yeah mostly the problem with kicad development isn't the quality of
the code, nor the committment of its developers, but their mindset to
input from others.

 in the bugreports that i've given them their responses have been
incredibly telling.

 the first bugreport described how they use "part" and "unit" in the
part editor, then f****g well start using "unit" and some *completely*
nonsensical word to refer to things by totally different names.

 so the exact same thing is called "part" in the library part editor
and is called "unit" when you place it in a schematic.

 ... has this been fixed?  of course not.

 then i mentioned that the concept of sharing pins across multiple
units within a library part is absolute total nonsense - *no* other
editor does this.  they have some utterly insane idea that it's good
that if any pin is in the exact same location across multiple units,
that it *must* be the the exact same pin (even if it isn't), therefore
when you move a pin in one unit *all* pins move across *all* units.

 this stupid nonsense causes absolute mayhem, corruption of library
parts, and ends up with segfaults just from loading a schematic.  i
actually had to stop editing multi-unit parts from the library and
edit the text files *by hand* it was that bad.

 ... has this been fixed?? of course not.

 has anyone given a satisfactory explanation as to why pins are shared
across multiple units *at all*?  no they have not.

 and that's not all.  there are many many things wrong with kicad
that, overall, make it utterly unusable for anything but the absolute
simplest of PCBs with a fraction of the components that you would
normally have on a professional PCB.

 in short - i'd *love* to be able to use kicad, but it's just such an
unprofessional program that right now i simply can't.

l.