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



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