PCB-RND is a fork of PCB from gEDA that a few of us have been working on. At the end of last year it became more obvious that development of PCB was grinding down. PCB's last release was in 2014 and I am not going to bad mouth anyone but it looked apparent that a new release was not going to happen any time soon. The rapid development and clarity of direction caused the mainline of PCB to consider adopting PCB-RND and Igor2 (it's leader) but that was rejected by the current project lead. So we are two different groups both sharing solutions when possible.
What is the difference?
* A lot of cleanups to the code. For example no more use of longjmp() and etc in the DRC subsystem.
* Parametric footprints mean less hunting for footprints. It also does fun things like defining screw holes as M4 tight or loose fitting.
* A mechanism to automatically pull footprints from geda-symbols and or any other web accessible repo means less leg work when you want to use a new component.
* Footprints are now stored in an arbitrarily defined (user) tree instead of a 2 level one for easier searching when you have to.
* Scripting in the language of your choice not just C the following are new awk, lua, scheme, stutter, php, perl, pascal, ruby, and yes python too.
* The file format is still compatible with PCB but we made the format a plugin. Our intention is to add support for more formats (Eagle/KiCAD) in the future with a DRC list like mechanism to let you "fix" features not available in the format you are exporting too.
* Exporters are now plugins and a lot of bugs in them have been fixed.
* We support a purely 64 bit environment not just a 32 or 32/64 bit one.
* We support MacOS.
* We have an experimental Windows port and if more interest in it comes we will make this a proper release.
* Bugs in the UI of PCB were also fixed (notably the twin hole bug)
* Reduced dependency on glib which made our memory footprint a lot smaller. Our eventual plan is to add another HID for libSDL to the list
In the near future we want to...
* Find users on Windows, MacOS, and other platforms (BSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris) who are willing to use the software and submit bug reports.
* LTSPICE users who want a PCB package
* QUCS users who want a PCB package
* Route as bus. (we have a patch that enables this but we want more users first for testing reasons)
* Back annotation We actually could ship with this but it only works for non-hierarchical netlists if you patch gEDA to support it. (they are reviewing the patch now for their next release)
We are trying to be more responsive and less antisocial than the gEDA mailing list. If you are interested please join us.
http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd/It should be noted that all of this has also caused PCB mainline to pick up their work a little. I don't wish to be unkind but a new release from them will probably not happen until we finish our next two or three.