Re: gEDA-user: A little puzzled about the purpose of gschem

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 24, 2010, at 5:42 PM, al davis wrote:

> On Saturday 24 April 2010, Link wrote:
>> I hadn't intended for anyone to interpret it that way, and
>> I'm sorry if you interpreted that as bashing gEDA. Perhaps
>> my choice of words was rather unfortunate.
> 
> Apology accepted.  
> 
>> What I intended to is that one component (the simulator) of
>> LTSpice tends to perform better _for me_ than gEDA's
>> equivalents, in sheer terms of the simulation results being
>> what I expect. I'm not sure if that is even a problem with
>> gnucap/ngspice or if I'm simply doing something wrong
>> myself, but I do know that I find LTSpice easier to use for
>> simulation. That does not mean I dislike gEDA, or think it's
>> bad, or anything of the sort - in fact, I find it to be
>> absolutely brilliant for schematic capture and PCB design.
> 
> There is a real problem with the way "gnetlist" works.  
> (contrary to what some others here say).  I have known this for 
> years.  Often people have trouble with it.  I don't know what to 
> say.  It seems I always need to hack the netlist.

In what way? Which gnetlist back end are you using? These things can be fixed, you know. Guile's easy if you're not phobic about parentheses ;-)

>  I have tried 
> to recruit help on this, specifically making gschem and pcb 
> plugins for the gnucap translator system.  No takers.

You're fighting against the power of the toolkit instead of exploiting it, I think.

>  Maybe 
> when I get my other pile of work out of the way I will do it 
> myself, for both geda and kicad.
> 
> Then "gspiceui" doesn't help.  I don't like that style anyway. 
> For a beginner, combined with how gnetlist works, I don't know 
> what to do.
> 
> In this environment, it's not gnucap or ngspice that is the 
> trouble spot.  It's gnetlist, documentation, and communication 
> between tools.  So the situation here is that people don't see 
> the capability that ngspice and gnucap have because of problems 
> elsewhere.
> 
> 
> The other problem people run into is that nobody here has 
> collected the hundreds (thousands?) of models (of all kinds) 
> that come from all over.  A commercial organization can pay a 
> junior person full time to maintain the collection.

And they can pay the model owners for redistribution licenses.

>  That's what 
> it takes.

There are also legal problems. My personal model library contains models that are free as in beer, but not as in speech. Some cannot be legally redistributed, especially together with GPL software. You have to get them from their owners.

> 
> Not in a commercial environment, this kind of thing has to be 
> done by the community, a shared effort. 
> 
> But really "google for it", and "check to see if it makes sense"  
> is the correct answer.  A lot of those models don't make sense 
> for the particular application people are asking about.

Indeed.

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




_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user