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

[Egil Kvaleberg <egil@kvaleberg.no>]

Stuart Brorson wrote:

> 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. 
Seems to have totally misunderstood.

Creating using M4 means that you can generate footprints in a 
*parameterized* manner, which is 100 times better than the WYSIWYG 
concept. Really.

Using a drawing tool for making footprints is like using WORD for making 
books.

The problem is that the maintenance of the M4 library is sketchy, at 
best. It really needs a full overhaul, to make it consistent and proper 
parameterized, but that is another matter.

> <> 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  the purpose of geda was to emulate the commercial software, that 
would be a very bad move.

Free software means that we are free to make thinks better, without the 
contstraints that commercial vendors face.

> <>
> 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.
It can of course be argued that perhaps some other language other than 
M¤ would have been better, and more suitable.

Egil