Re: gEDA-user: Matching footprints with symbols

[Phil Frost <indigo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 03:33:29PM -0600, John Doty wrote:
> 
> The two projects are able to work together *because* they were
> intentionally designed with clean interfaces, and no unnecessary
> entanglements. You propose to throw away the very virtue that made the
> partnership possible in the first place. Some of us want to keep the
> tools open to other partnerships.

I would like to mention that there are other programs that are
intentionally designed with clean interfaces, and are largely agnostic
about other programs, yet integrate with hundreds of them very well. If
one would like an example of such a program, look to text editors.

Emacs and Vim and whatever other favorite editors people might have
generally know little or nothing about debuggers, man pages, source code
syntax, or build procedures, and yet there is seldom an experienced
programmer that hasn't taught his text editor about these things,
including his own personal preferences and unique choice of tools.

As Linux filesystem developer and convicted wife murderer Hans Rieser
wrote:

"The expressive power of an operating system is NOT proportional to the
number of components, but instead is proportional to the number of
possible connections between its components."

I think that goes for any program as well. What I'd like to see in gEDA
is more easy ways to connect each component to the other components.
Most of the mechanisms are already there, but they are either hard to
use or hard to discover. It's probably as much of a documentation
problem as it is implementation.

Anyway, when those methods are accessible to those who aren't veteran
developers of gEDA, you might see repositories of extensions pop up,
such as Vim and Emacs have. Then confused users can be pointed to an
appropriate connection between the tools they want instead of insulted.


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