Re: gEDA-user: wishful UI

[Peter TB Brett <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:09:08 -0600, John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Unfortunately, some of our
> developers take the attitude that dumbing down the (almost supernaturally
> productive) UI is the way to attract more developers.

Who?

> 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.
> 

As I've said before, the Guile API in gschem is fundamentally broken, due
to the way that the invisible state is stored and accessed.  It has
inconsistent naming and calling conventions, and it's possible to write
perfectly valid code that leaves the gschem instance in an inconsistent
state.  This is partly because it was initially introduced just as a
convenient way to specify options, keybindings and menu layout in a
declarative manner, but has had some extra things bolted on in an organic
manner. I've made a start on trying to build a more consistent Guile API,
but it's been pretty hard going, and unfortunately for a number of reasons
I don't have a huge amount of time for gEDA at the moment.

I don't know about the Guile API for gnetlist, but last time I checked it
suffered from *some* of the same problems, but not nearly to the same
extent.  There's some problems with gnetlist backends -- for example, some
of them are written in a non-tail-recursive style, which causes stack
exhaustion on large designs, but that's not too difficult to fix.

Peter

-- 
Peter Brett <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre


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