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

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 28, 2010, at 5:54 AM, David C. Kerber wrote:

> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: geda-user-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
>> [mailto:geda-user-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Doty
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 6:40 AM
>> To: gEDA user mailing list
>> Subject: Re: gEDA-user: A little puzzled about the purpose of gschem
> 
> ...
> 
>>>  Harder than having a proper library that allows me to focus on the
>>>  circuit design instead of these kinds of clerical tasks 
>> that appear to
>>>  arise from an utter lack of understanding that human 
>> beings do not like
>>>  to do mundane, repetitive tasks that are best suited for 
>> the software
>>>  to take care of.
>> 
>> And gEDA is better at doing the mundane, repetitive tasks 
>> than other systems. Once you have your processes set up, a 
>> single "make" can generate netlists, BOM, simulation results, 
>> printable schematics, typeset documentation...
> 
> How long did it take you to learn make well enough to do this with it?

Oh, maybe 20 minutes. Make is easy. Best to start with S.I. Feldman's great original writeup: it's all over the web, for example at:

www.hpdc.syr.edu/~chapin/cis657/make.pdf

Meditate for a minute on how we've lost the ability to write so clearly and concisely. Then go to your more modern "make" doc to pick up knowledge of the more modern version of implicit rules (easier and more flexible). That'll do you.

> 
> How long does it take you to set up your processes for any given project?

Depends on the scale of the project. It's a small fraction of the project time. Yes, it's annoying work, not comfortably mindless point and click, but it saves bundles of time.

And that's the emotional issue: point and click is *comfortable*, scripting isn't. So users don't notice how much time is wasted pointing and clicking, but are annoyed by even a few minutes of trivial Makefile programming.

> 
> ...
> 
>>>  Or use a better toolkit that takes that needless, wasteful, and
>>>  professionally irrelevant struggle out of the equation.
>> 
>> If you're struggling, you're not using the tool effectively. 
>> Show us your work. We can help you, and when we figure out 
>> why you're puzzled maybe we can improve the documentation.
> 
> But to a newbie, learning to use a tool effectively if its only power is at a command line, takes a loooooong time, and much referring to a  separate reference of some kind to find the needed command.

The pricey professional tools are hard to learn. Been there, done that, gEDA's easier.

>  A gui, while it can be limiting to an expert, will often speed up that initial learning curve, especially if it's just a wrapper around a command-line or other interface, so the newbie can use it to learn the capabilities and commands that the command-line uses.

Wrap the tools all you want, that's a fine example of factoring. But don't, for example, put kludges into gschem itself to support a specific flow. 

We already have specialized kludges in gnetlist to support VAMS. One worthy project would be to rewrite these in Guile in the VAMS back end, perhaps refactoring gnetlist to support this.

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




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