LibreCAD - A Dead App

"Externally LibreCAD looks kinda like a dead app (stable release is over 3 years old, last unstable release is over 2 years old on an abandoned development branch)".

I totally disagree but it's clear why people form this view. The LibreCAD Mushroom Management system doesn't present the fantastic work done by the community for people to make an informed view. It is important because the whole community misses out on valuable contributions from people that don't join the community. Image what could be achieved with double the resources.

How to make the LibreCAD community more vibrant:

1. Make a plan so community contributions to develop LibreCAD are used efficiently and effectively.
2. Communicate with the community. Celebrate our successes by committing to regular updates on what is happening in the community, how planned goals are progressing.
3. Releases. Forget the concept of Draft - release every project regularly (say quarterly) so the community can test the work and contribute to development taking the best direction and improving every version. (There's no benefit developing the perfect Netscape.) The Pareto Principle says most of the benefit occurs from the first work anyway.
4. Keep Development (Master) branches separate from Release (Stable) branches for all projects.

Many open source communities manage these things more effectively than LibreCAD. What do you think?

For certain LibreCAD urgently needs a new official release. For visibility in the public, announcements, forums, appearance at portableapps etc. Against frustration of users. The new pretty readthedocs refers to 2.2.0, the normal user will only obtain 2.1.3. Drawings done now might have to be worked over when later opened in 2.2.0, due to changes in handling. 2.2.0 is better and quite stable. Against frustration of developers, as it takes so long for their contributions to be incorporated and used.
There is a queue of commits with improvements waiting to be merged. Our Lord(ofBikes) is now about working them up after a long pause. Can he be helped? Let's get a new release out, be it perfect or not. You can always push a bugfix release after it.

   

@Flywire.

I do I agree with you on all points.
When I worked on LibreCAD for hours on a daily base I had my successes and worked for hard to make something work for the future. At that time Qt 3 was phases out and we (the community, at that tine CNC Linux) needed a CAD system that would also be distributed.

However, I am not a person that celebrates successes (people at my work also tell me I don't they, yet they feel I should). I do think it's a good idea to do so, a lot of technical people are just not good with communication.

Perhaps we need a spokes person?

One other issue is that a lot of open projects are doing it effectivly is because there is some form of a company behind it, that helps A LOT. As far as I am aware, no developers of LibreCAD benefit financially from LibreCAD.
Yes we can take dontations... but that also means a lot of money management and to do that, at least here in holland you need 3 people to start such organisation, not at all easy.

So a plan forward, to get us over the line and take the next step takes a lot fo efford...

Hey Ries, a few of us over at osarch want to know how we can help. I see lordofbikes has been merging some requests on LC2 lately which is good to see. LC has a large user base does it need some community organizing? I see there are a lot of bugs that need triaging.

Has anyone managed to build LC3 and run it? I'm willing to try but I wouldn't hold my breath. I think github can do nightly builds right?