gEDA-user: gschem modifications

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Back again after a few weeks in Scotland doing some other work.

If you recall, I am working to make improvements to the gEDA suite for
use in undergraduate teaching at Cambridge Univ. Engineering Department.

Over the past weeks, I've been becoming more familiar with the codebase,
and now have some local changes made which I think it would be good to
submit for re-integration before the code-sprint.

As I'm not familiar with CVS, the work I've been doing is as follows:

Checkout CVS (annonnymous) (I did this on Tues, 18th July):

Compile, modify, compile.. from within the resulting geda/gaf directory.


I'd appreciate advice on better working practices, as to seperate out my
changes, I now need to checkout the new CVS, make a diff between that
and my work (after cleaning the build files (.o etc) out), then sort out
the chances which I have made, so I can then end up with a patch for
each group of new functionality / changed behaviour I've been working
on.

I'm sure this will be a lesson to think more clearly about how I'm going
to seperate my mods from the CVS download!


The changes I've made for our use (some of which should will be useful
back in CVS I hope):

Mouse behaviour:
---------------

 * Added option to allow mouse panning on middle mouse button, as well
as RH button.

 * Changed pan "gain" to 1, rather than 5, so when panning with the
mouse, the schematic page moves as if you had actually grabbed the page
at the point when you start panning from

 * (Hardcoded), scroll wheel behaviour to zoom in/out, with LEFT/RIGHT,
UP/DOWN with a "shift" / "control" modifier

 * Slightly modified the preview widget / event handler code to allow
mouse scroll zooming with the same event handler as the main schematic
view

We now have a gschem, where the mouse scroll wheel is able to zoom, pan
by dragging, and pan LR / UD by scrolling with modifier keys - basically
making it a navigation button / wheel.

Re-layed out component picker:
-----------------------------

 * Eventually, I would like to see the component picker able to dock as
a side pane along the left or right of the schematic page view. I've
re-layed out the dialog in a more vertical way, and removed the
superfluous "Apply" and "Close" buttons.

 * Split out component selection code from x_fileselect.c into a new
file, x_compselect.c

 * Modified preview widget code to allow it to resize with available
space

Superficial cosmetic:
--------------------

 * First attempt at an icon for gschem ( from a photo of an 8pin SOIC ),
mainly so I can identify which window is gschem easily in my "Alt-Tab"
window switcher.

 * Code to set the icon is a bug hard-coded hack, and needs someone who
knows how to assist in its proper implementation. (Getting automake /
whatever to install the icon in the right place, and getting gschem to
find it - rather than my hard-coded path method).

Bugs noted:
----------

 * Some odd behaviour I'm noticing when zooming the window after a
resize, which can jump the mouse-pointer off the screen, put the
schematic page origin in a funny place, allow components to be placed
above the origin.

 * A crash I saw once - in the autosave code, in s_page_autosave(), from
libgeda/src/s_page.c. Unfortunatly, I lost the stack dump (which wasn't
helpful anyway), but the problem appeared to be that toplevel->page_head
was not equal to NULL, but was not pointing at valid memory.

I note that this callback is an auto-save system called from a g_timeout
or something. This timeout is never cancelled once it is setup, so is
there a possibility that it gets called concurrently with the active
page being free'd?

I never saw the crash again (and presuming it could be an unrelated
memory corruption which caused it), stopped digging at the auto-save
code.



Any ideas on how to seperate these patched functionalities out, and
which bits are suitable / useful for upstream inclusion?


I'm keen to hear more about people's thoughts on a component manager /
database for light -> heavy symbol work on a per company / project
basis, as this is exactly what I'm wanting to implement as part of this
project.

As some will recall, a new project manager is on the cards, although
I've not yet spent much time working out how it should work, either GUI
or backend wise.


Regards,

Peter Clifton




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