gnupic: Re: [gnupic] [PIC] Piklab 0.13.0 released
Subject:
Re: [gnupic] [PIC] Piklab 0.13.0 released
From:
Nicolas ####@####.####
Date:
23 Jan 2007 10:45:05 +0000
Message-Id: <92d8b98a0701230243y5fb55c86i99c39825d2c290fc@mail.gmail.com>
On 1/23/07, iain duncan ####@####.#### wrote:
> Hopefully this isn't opening any political wars, but what is the
> difference in product and intention between pikdev and piklab?
hehe :)
Well I think the basic intentions are the same.
I can make a short story seen from my point of view. At the beginning
of 2005, I wanted to add to Pikdev the ability to talk to the ICD2.
There was some initial attempt on Linux to program with the ICD2
"lplab" which didn't work correctly for me anyway. I contacted Alain,
the author of Pikdev, to ask him to collaborate and in particular to
setup a public CVS tree (so that I could stay in sync with his
modifications and also so that I could make a branch...). He didn't
want at the time to do that and said that patches would work alright.
After working on the sources for a while, I decided that the changes
would be too extensive. Also I made the decision that I would lose too
much of my time communicating this way...
So I forked Pikdev into Piklab and from that time the sources have
been modified a lot.
In term of functionnalities, the differences are now quite big: Piklab
has support for ICD2, Pickit2 (Pikdev did add support for the Pickit2
through an external programmer), ICD1, PicStart+,... Piklab has
greatly extended the support for other compilers. There is support for
debugging with ICD2 and gpsim. There are a lot of enhancements to the
interface.
I ask people to use both and see which one fits more their needs. In
the absolute, it's a pity the author of Pikdev and I haven't
collaborated; in practice I don't think we would have been that far in
term of features. There is always people that complain that some
open-source project duplicates some other one and wastes precious time
(cf KDE and Gnome). I don't agree in general. For example, there were
times when I wanted to completely rewrite some part of Piklab to have
a better structure and I probably couldn't have with Pikdev...
As a more general conclusion, I think it is quite hard to have two
lead developers on a small open-source project. If the project is
modular or big enough, then it becomes possible and the project
development can speed up. Otherwise, a small project needs active
users that report bugs, ask for new features. The best being
super-users that submit patches to fix bugs or add modular features...
For what it's worth,
Nicolas
