New discussions, new maintainer #749
Replies: 10 comments 12 replies
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@emcniece Welcome and thank you for picking this up. The biggest issue I know of is the random hangups, especially on larger files. There have been some issues here, but it's more common to see things posted on CNC user forums. Sometimes, the GUI will be non responsive but the job continues without issue and sometimes it all just needs to be restarted. |
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Facebook CNCjs Users Group is the primary one. |
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I don't do Facebook, but the biggest hobby level groups in the US are probably Carbide 3D and Inventables. Both have user forums and both have "unofficial" Facebook groups. Here's a link to one of the issues. I actually saw a new one raised a day or so ago that I believe you responded to as possibly being an EMI issue. This is a different thing... definitely a cncjs issue. |
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Just finished importing the open issues to a new project: https://github.com/orgs/cncjs/projects/3/views/1?layout=table |
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@emcniece welcome, and well done. I am also here ready to do more in here, I want to mainly see if I can deply this on my machines |
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I understand the desire to avoid Facebook, but doing so effectively isolates one from the vast majority of users, who don't know how to use GitHub issues. That isolation is bad from the standpoint of community support, but can be good for one's personal sanity. |
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Consider what happens when a user searches for, say, "cncjs installation". Who knows which page they will land on? If they are new to CNCjs they will not understand any of the context necessary to determine whether the instructions they are seeing are relevant to their situation, whether they are current or hopelessly out of date, or any number of other factors that could lead them down a rathole. Ideally, every page with instructions would start with a link back to an overview that gives context about how to proceed in different situations, and then describes the context and limitations of the information on the current page. Unfortunately, that level of context is rarely provided. When someone creates a new page of instructions, their typical mindset is that they are deeply immersed in what they are doing at the moment. What they write reflects that narrow focus, and then when a new user lands there, lacking any of that context, they are utterly confused. Good documentation is hard. Really hard. |
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I'm not saying that I like FB. In fact in many ways I really really hate it. When Cheton created the group I cringed. But then, eventually, I saw the very large number of CNCjs users who really do not know about anything else. Should we just ignore them? (Actually, I contemplate doing just that about twice a week.) |
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FB is good for visibility, thats sure, nothing will probably have so much visibility elswhere. But this comes with a cost, lots of users with lots of same problems, and plus people think that some developer or maintainer has the need to solve their problem. This is how I see it. |
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I was hoping that the community would support itself via FB, but I quickly discovered that the quality of community answers was just terrible. Responders often misunderstand the question (answer a different question than was asked), give answers that are too brief to be understood, or just give wrong answers. A lot of the questions have to do with installation problems, which require knowledge of system software, NPM, Linux techniques for autostarting programs, and other topics that very few users know anything about. About half of the questions are really about configuring GRBL. Many new users do not really understand that most of the difficult work is done by a separate controller running GRBL or something. CNCjs is what they see, so they think that CNCjs is responsible for all of the behavior. The DIY CNC world is extremely difficult to support because there are so many different components from so many different sources. The components are inexpensive or free, with little or no support available from the suppliers. New user finds themselves in a complex world involving mechanical systems, electronics, firmware, software, wiring, GCode, CAD/CAM, and post processors, and typically understands none of it. One thing I learned from years of developing boot firmware for general purpose computers is "the bug is always filed against the software that displays the error message". |
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👋 Hey, new maintainer onboarding.
Hi everyone. @cheton and @MitchBradley have warmly accepted my offer to help out with maintainership of the CNCjs project. It'll take me a little while to get up to speed, but to start I'm focusing on triaging the issue backlog and consolidating the CI pipeline so that we can start moving tickets through the queue. You might see your issue get labelled or assigned to a Project, that's likely me getting organized!
One of the major pain points I've heard about so far is the variance in deploy platforms and how tricky they can be. I'll keep my eyes open for these tickets in the queue. I'm also interested in optimization, and while that will come later I've started to peek into the Webpack bundle and the Docker image.
Here's a treemap of the production Webpack bundle (~15Mb):
And here's an analysis of the most recently published Docker image (~3Gb uncompressed):
I look forward to digging in to this work over the next few months. Here's a rough timeline:
What's your favourite feature of CNCjs? What gives you the most grief? I'm all ears.
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