Re: gEDA-user: Notes from this evening's Free Dog meeting

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Aug 5, 2005, at 4:22 AM, Leva wrote:
>
> > - Also in PCB, it would be nice have one thing (button, menuitem, 
> > etc...) to
> > reload the whole layout, reload the netlist, put the xxxx.pcb.new into 
> > the
> > buffer.
> >
> > Unfortunately, I don't have a good enough programming skill, so I can't
> > implement these things. These are just suggestions. Ignore it, if it's 
> > just
> > rubbish.
>
>
>   And while we're on the subject, I'd love to see PCB be able to 
> *generate* a netlist from a PCB layout.  I could certainly code it, but 
> I've not yet familiarized myself with PCB's (rather substantial) internals.

I think something like this would be extremely useful.  Right now there
is no real backannotation capability from pcb to gschem.  The forward
annotation (gschem to pcb) approach that Bill has provided for us works
fairly well, but I think it knows entirely too much about the details of
the .pcb file format.

I'd like to have PCB provide a stable interface to something which would
produce a netlist like output.  This output would only contain the list
of elements (R3 is a "0603", U1 is a "SO16") and the connectivity
netlist.  I think with some work, we could come up with a format which
then talked to a general forward/back annotation tool.  Basically you'd
have a "annotation" output from gnetlist, and an "annotation" output
from pcb.  Then a gannotate tool would look at the two and tell you what
has to happen to sync things up.

Now for PCB, also provide a stable interface that lets you do things
like say "give me an instance of a 'SO8'" "rename R3 to R7", etc.  Same
thing in gschem.

Now we have hopefully gotten away from needing many different annotation
tools which all need to know too much about internals of different tools.

-Dan