These lists are meant to provide the developers a reminder of undone projects. It is also a wish list capturing user’s desires for new features. New developers can also look here for projects which they might be interested in working on.

See tasks for non-programmer tasks.

The PCB Roadmap is on a separate page.

• Netlist Hacker
  Somebody who is familiar with the generation/management of netlists is needed to help work on and improve gnetlist. Whether the existing gnetlist is used or if a total rewrite is needed is always an open option. Must be extremely familiar with UNIX/C/C++ programming.
• Symbol Library Hacker
  Somebody is needed to help get the symbol library up to the current symbol spec. This individual would also help in the integration of new symbols and making sure that they meet the current symbol spec. The task of getting the symbol library up to spec is a combination of manual effort and automated updating (this sort of automated updating lends itself very well to a person with shell/perl scripting familiarity).
• Windows Port Hacker/Manager
  Somebody with expertise building and testing gEDA on UNIX systems and familiarity with the MS Windows 95/98/NT platform is needed to manage the gEDA Windows port. Testing, bug fixing, packaging, and releasing of gEDA on the Windows platform would be the primary responsibility of this person. This task requires a person who knows C, GTK+, UNIX, and MS Windows programming. The Windows port will NOT move forward if this task is not filled.
• MacOS port manager
  Have the issues mentioned in "Laying out printed circuit boards with open-source tools" been fixed already?
• Release Hacker
  Somebody who wants to create and manage releases is needed. Releases occur when the code is ready to be released, so there's no marketing pressure. This task requires gEDA building/testing familiarity as well perhaps some minor code hacking.

This section should contain a list of only those issues that are considered as being important enough to block release until they are resolved. If a feature or bug gets bumped or has its importance reduced, please remove it from the list or move it to the appropriate later release.

• Libgeda:
  • Enable handling of .sch files with symbols having some (but not all) pins promoted onto the .sch file. This will enable pin-swapping via backannotation from PCB. (Architectural change)
  • Merge per-page netlisting from gnetlist (or re-write if necessary). (Bounty)
• Gschem:
  • Create a button in gschem which will invoke gsch2pcb to create a netlist file ready for PCB to read in. (Bounty, once PCB is modified to support an action file.)
  • Enable hierarchical bus support. (Architectural change)
  • Make gschemrc variables settable from within gschem using a “settings” pull-down menu item (new). The idea is to update the contents of the gschemrc or gafrc files using pull-down menus, and write the changes out to the correct RC files. (Bounty)
  • Improve symbol library to handle very large symbol collections better.
  • Now the SELECTION is a GedaList and we can get “changed” signals, make more dialogs non-modal:
    • Single attribute editor
    • Text properties
    • Line width and type
    • Fill type
    • Edit slot
    • Edit color
    • Text size (Sets size for new text, so doesn't rely on the selection anyway)
  • Support for embedding LaTeX maths to be rendered in text.
    • This could be output only, or preview bitmaps could be generated and cached by calling LaTeX, dvips and ps2epsi.
    • Would we add a new type of object for this, or allow attaching a “latex=1” attribute to the text object its self?
• Gattrib:
  • Get printing working. (Bounty)
  • Enable attachment of attributes to nets. (Architectural)
• Garchive:
  • Incorporate guile so that it reads RC files using the same mechanism as the rest of gEDA/gaf.
• Refdes_renum:
  • Doesn’t currently work properly with slotted parts (it gives new refdes numbers to slotted parts). Fix it so it recognizes slotted parts and assigns refdes appropriately. (Bounty)
• PCB
  • Put various commands which are only accessible via a :command(foo) into the top menu. Newbies want to see what actions are in the menus since that way they know what PCB can do. (Bounty on a per-action basis)
  • Provide a toolbar of buttons for common actions. (Bounty)
  • Make the difference between editing footprints and PCBs much more obvious. If you're in footprint editing mode, then perhaps make the background color change. (Architectural)
  • Create a “file → save” dialog window. In the dialog window, provide a pull-down giving the option to save as a PCB (default) or as a footprint. (Bounty)

• Develop scheme for backward annotation of changes from PCB to gschem. Requires modifications to libgeda to support, e.g. pin promotion from .sym file to .sch file (enabling pin swapping). (Architectural)
• Create a Gerber → .pcb conversion tool. Result is metal layer or footprint editable by PCB. This might be a Perl script. (Bounty)
• Implement lockfiles between gattrib and gschem. (Bounty)

• Remove use of non GList linked lists. This is very invasive work, but allows much code cleanup where mixtures of the old and GList methods were available.
• Remove unused variables and functions from various structures. Unused may also include “used”, but ineffective.

• Remove back-exports to libgeda of global function pointers from gschem and other libgeda “clients”. These aren't portable.
• Clean up / produce generic API interfaces to act on an object of any type, or lists of objects.
• Convert functions used within one “.c” file, and not useful for public API into static functions, removing from prototype.h.