Re: gEDA-user: weird names in PCB part library

[sdb@cloud9.net (Stuart Brorson)]

Hi --

I don't want to upset any applecarts here, so forgive my point if
it is not PC.  

One of the funky things about PCB is precisely that it has two footprint
libraries, one of them this M4 based [1] "automatic footprint generator",
and the other a more-or-less standard set of footprint files.  

Perhaps back in the stone age, when PCB was written for the 
Altair 8800^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Atari [2], generating symbols on the fly
from an M4 macro was a good idea in order to save space memory.  Now,
however, it strikes me as a weird relic of the past which can only
frighten users away, encouraging them to continue hiding under the
skirts of commerical layout software vendors.  

If I had my druthers, we'd deprecate that entire M4 symbol library, and
move to the file based library.  Eventually, we'd kill the M4 library
altogether.  

Any benefit of using an M4 script to generate symbols can be
replicated using Perl or Python.  M4 should be banashed.

MHO only.  :-)

Stuart


[1]  I'm not gonna rant about M4, except to note that it is a scripting
language based upon Lisp.  (Talk about cognitive dissonance!)  Perhaps
this made sense on old Symbolics lispms [3], but today should only be
allowed to hide shamefully away deep in the bowels of the GNU make
system.  It should never appear anywhere near a user, for fear that
they might be frightened away and never come back.  Again, MHO. 

[2]  Historical humor reference.  For those too young to remember:
http://www.cis.usouthal.edu/faculty/daigle/project1/1975malt.htm

[3]  Another ancient historical reference.  FAQ is here:
http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/lisp/lispm-faq-and-history.html

> 
> The names signify the new (no ~) and old (~) style libraries.
> The old libraries use M4 macros and are update with make;
> the new libraries are simply element files in a directory hierarchy.
> 
> harry
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Karel Kulhav=FD" <clock@twibright.com>
> To: <geda-user@seul.org>
> Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 7:39 AM
> Subject: gEDA-user: weird names in PCB part library
> 
> 
> > Hello
> >
> > PCB 20040530 library has different categories. Some of them are
> > in the form "name" and some "~name". Why is it this way? It looks
> > a bit weird.
> >
> > Cl<
> 
>