Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

[Kai-Martin Knaak <kmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:50:09 -0500, John Griessen wrote:

> John Doty was thinking of aiming high in the thread named multi-part
> symbol support when he offered to help with some scheme/guile coding to
> keep the intended flexibility level of gschem/gnetlist up where it is. 

His way of dealing with the order bug would mean patching each and every 
back-end. Talk about efficient coding.


> Kai-Martin and DJ didn't seem to care about lost flexibility.

Not true. There is no loss of flexibility implied by the proposed 
ordering. So there is nothing to care about.

Internal ordering does not hide any attributes from the backend. The only 
information it hides, is information on the order the symbols were added 
to the schematic.  This is something, no decent backend should ever care 
care about.  
Heck, the *.sch format itself already hides many details of user input 
from the netlister. There is no information on deletes symbols. The time 
and date a symbol has been added is lost. There is no hint who added a 
specific item. There is no history whatsoever. So there is a huge loss of 
information. However, this is a good thing as it keeps the *.sch files 
from bloating. (Ever wondered why protel or eagle files are so big?) 
It also is in accordance with the principle of least surprise. The 
meaning of schematic is defined by its contents, not by its history.

The order of symbols in the *.sch is a remnant of the input related 
information mentioned above. There is no reason to pass this information 
to the backends. 

---<(kaimartin)>---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x6C0B9F53



_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user