LibreCAD Bounce Page

You seem to be looking for LibreCAD project information of some sort. This is not the LibreCAD project page. Pick from a link below to get wherever it is you're really wanting to be:

Project Page

Project Home at GitHub

Mailing Lists

LibreCAD.org forums

Project Documentation Wiki

Project Home at SourceForge

IRC (#librecad at freenode)

Pre-release RPM packages
For Fedora/RHEL rpm-based systems

Does this seem like an aweful lot of different sites for one project?

Yes, it is. So let me explain...

The central project site is currently more of a portal that links to other project sites where LibreCAD lives than a singlular home which hosts everything. It works in the same way this page does, but LibreCAD.org is much cooler than this page (moving things, drop downs, colors, etc.).

Git is the greatest version control system for program source code to have been developed so far. GitHub is the best way to fully take advantage of Git if you interact with your team over the web much (and in open source this is nearly always the case). That being said, it is natural for GitHub to be the home for the actual development work. But there are two problems. Most average users of open source are more familiar with sf.net than GitHub and sf.net's issue tracking system is superior to GitHub's (at least in the view of the LibreCAD project lead).

The mailinglists are where some communication happens -- but not as much as on the IRC channel. But don't get me wrong, the mailinglists are reliable, and in the future are likely to grow in importance, but at this stage of community evolution IRC is where most of the action (blathering) is.

The forums are a stable way to communicate as well. But this requires some distinction. The forums at LibreCAD.org are very active, but the forums which exist places like sf.net or GitHub are likely to go unanswered for a bit and are much lower traffic. The LibreCAD.org forum are also tied into the mailinglists -- something that can't be done easily on sf.net or GitHub -- so once again the choice of which site supplies which feature to the community is determined by which site offers the best feature.

The documentation most LibreCAD users reference is still the one from the old, dead QCad Community Edition project from many years ago. The documentation doesn't fit anymore and is sorely showing its age. In fact, for newcomers the old documentation can be downright confusing simply because the menus have all changed around and the icon art is completely different now. We really just need a new manuals. In fact, we need several. We need an accurate users' guide, an accurate developers' guide, and a quick start guide for those who just want to hop straight in. All of the LibreCAD developers conferred and it turns out nobody's neighborhood is home to a wild pack of feral technical documentation writers -- and that is why we have a wiki. That is it hosted on this particular web server and not somewhere else is just a reflection of who had space available and was willing to maintain it first (me).

SourceForge (aka "sf.net") is where most people already have an account, it is what most people know, and it has a great issue tracking system. It makes the most sense for a fledgling project with tons of promise like LibreCAD to host file downloads and use the issue tracker there, but not to actually use the somewhat outdated version control system that sf.net uses for actual development.

The #librecad IRC channel on FreeNode is a great way to get in touch with developers and some of the more visible users in the community. At this point in the community's evolution IRC is the best fit of speed, ease and core group size. This is likely to change in the future and #librecad will probably eventually get overrun with help vampires and the like and we'll need then to open separate dev and meeting channels. But this is not yet the case, and #librecad is one of the more important places communication currently happens.

The pre-release RPM page for Fedora and EPEL-type systems is my own doing. I am planning on pushing LibreCAD into Fedora and EPEL and continuing to maintain the project there. Rallaz has done some outstanding packaging work already, but his focus is on making specs that build against all the major rpm-based systems (including Mandriva and SuSE), whereas I am concerned specifically with Fedora-derived systems. Getting a package built for a project like Fedora is not the same thing as getting that package accepted -- the review process is a bit long and there are some inconsistencies with the way LibreCAD is built and installed that need to be tailored to this line of distros prior to acceptance. Doing that work will also make maintenance in the future much more straight forward, so I'm beginning now. Most likely everything on this site outside of the Wiki will become a link archive after LibreCAD makes its way into Fedora and EPEL.

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