Re: gEDA-user: Matching footprints with symbols

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 16, 2010, at 10:44 PM, Matthew Wilkins wrote:

>    It seems like there is room to add a footprint selector utility that
>    would interface between gschem/gattrib and PCB without impacting
>    non-PCB users in any way.  In fact if PCB had an HID where it just
>    starts up as a footprint browser and nothing else, you could use PCB
>    itself to assign footprints to symbols from within gschem or gattrib.
>    An option in the gschem config file could allow  users to define a
>    command line to start PCB in that mode, and PCB would output the
>    selected footprint attribute value before exiting.
>    Users of other workflows might be able to use a similar type of browser
>    utility to work with other types of libraries  -- gnucap models?
>    verilog models?  I don't know if that would be useful or not...
>    Anyway, the point is that this type of feature can be added and could
>    be be completely invisible to other workflows, unless they want to use
>    it.

Completely invisible? No!

1. Any feature must be documented. Every addition to the documentation adds to the fog hiding the the other parts of the documentation. One of the advantages of a clean, simple, well-factored, modular approach is that it simplifies the documentation.

2. Any feature can be misconfigured.

3. Any feature can be misunderstood.

In commercial software, there's tremendous pressure to add "features", with the result that bloated, low productivity tools are the norm. A free tool need not follow that path.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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