Perhaps back in the stone age, when PCB was written for the=20
Altair 8800^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Atari [2], generating symbols on the
fly
from an M4 macro was a good idea in order to save space memory.=20
Seems to have totally misunderstood.
Well, perhaps I don't know exactly why M4 was used to generate symbols
when PCB was written over 20 years ago. But I *do* think I know a
thing or two about circuit design. And from the standpoint of a
circuit designer (i.e. our target audience for gEDA), M4 is
unnecessarily old, scary, nasty, and obscure. For PCB to make inroads
into the circuit design community, it needs to act and feel like a
contemporary PCB layout tool. M4 is unnecessary baggage. Footprint
files -- i.e. PCB's second lib -- are the way it's done these days.
Creating parameterized footprints using stand-alone TCL, Perl, or
Python scripts would be more attractive and more contemporary.
M4 is "obscure" and TCL, Perl, and Python are not??Creating using M4 means that you can generate footprints in a=20
*parameterized* manner, which is 100 times better than the WYSIWYG=20
concept. Really.
Generating footprints using an automated, parameterized method is a
good thing. I completely agree. Do it using TCL, Perl, or
Python.
Use a scripting language to process macros instead of a macro
processor, in other words.