[Discuss] Github/hardware (Was Re: discuss Digest, Vol 10, Issue 99)

[Cameron Adamez]

On Mar 26, 2013, at 3:53 PM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Cameron Adamez
> <cameron at suspectdevices.com> wrote:
>> I've had issues pulling change requests for my projects. As there's no way for me to cherry-pick
>> changes and since I haven't started writing a diff program for Eagle files, I've had my board
>> accidentally clobbered or mangled via pull requests. I found the correct settings for
>> binary files for Eagle 5, but pull requests were still arduous after that.
> 
> Have you considered not using a binary file format?

I tried using KiCad but it crashes on the Mac. I wanted to wait to upgrade to Eagle 6 after I could cordon off Eagle 5 (to upgrade/downgrade files as needed), but I ended up doing the upgrade anyway. We'll see how this goes. I'm not an EE -- I'm a web developer and sometimes artist -- so I haven't tried any of the other CAD programs. 

> What about something that is composed from multiple files that get combined? For
> instance, I think even simple netlists could handle that. Another
> thought that comes to mind is that automated testing could help your
> contributors not commit terrible things that break everything.

I was unaware that there was automated testing for board design.
None of the changes that I had in the pull request were bad from a design perspective; it was just difficult to manually pull changes from one board and schematic to the other. In my usage, I couldn't figure out how to do my normal pull / commit workflow in order to keep the changes synchronized. Perhaps I'm behind the curve in this regard.

On Mar 26, 2013, at 3:58 PM, "Windell H. Oskay" <windell at oskay.net> wrote:
> 
> Also, github does support visual diffs for images in repositories.  One of the consequences of this is that if you include a current image of the SCH/BRD with each commit, you can use the visual diff even on pure binary files.  
> ( I've written more about this kind of stuff on my blog, too:  http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2011/improving-open-source-hardware-visual-diffs/ )
> 

This must be a new feature. Thanks :)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20130326/3bb5f01a/attachment.html>