Re: gEDA-user: wishful UI

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 13, 2010, at 5:49 PM, Stefan Salewski wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-08-13 at 19:28 -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
>>> I guess it would be no great deal for smart (but very busy) people
>>> like Peter C. and DJ, to implement the basic concept. For people not
>>> familiar with the internals of gschem and PCB like me it may take
>>> very long...
>> 
>> I'm quite willing to teach people PCB internals, if it means having
>> more PCB developers.
>> 
>> 
> 
> In my opinion writing some basic documentation about the internal work
> of PCB would be really a good idea. (I can remember that I looked at the
> PCB source code about two years ago: I was very positive surprised about
> the fact that the code was very compact, but I was not able to see the
> basic concepts...)

The same problem applies to gschem/gnetlist. Unfortunately, some of our developers take the attitude that dumbing down the (almost supernaturally productive) UI is the way to attract more developers. But from where I sit, the real problem is that the internals of gschem, gnetlist, and especially libgeda are poorly documented. This is especially problematic at the guile scripting interface (code for guile functions in C is pretty obscure). I've nibbled at this from outside, deducing function from behavior and writing some of my findings up, but it would really help if the experts would put in some effort here.

Developers who'd be attracted by a dumbed-down UI are exactly the folks I do not want to see working on gEDA.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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