Re: gEDA-user: Life and death for gEDA: portability...

[Svenn Are Bjerkem <svenn@bjerkem.de>]

On Saturday 27 December 2003 22:59, Terry Porter wrote:
> I have to disagree with just about everything you have said Bill.
>
> Personally I couldn't care less about portability to other OS's, especially
> Windows myself, as I have exactly what I want with gEDA and Linux.

Bad attitude, dude. Port or die. I am now a Mac / linux / windows user and I 
can't agree less with you.

>
> I have been using gEDA for many years now, and Gschem has always been nice
> and stable (imho), unlike Mozilla, AbiWord, and OpenOffice which have been
> very buggy and still have stability issues.

It has been stable, but very confusing with its difficulties in building on 
all variations of linux distributions.

>
> Furthermore I have had plenty of issues with Tk/Tcl, and I don't see it as
> a 'better' replacement for Guile by any means. In fact I avoid Tk/Tcl apps
> wherever possible. RMS once said, "Tcl has a peculiar syntax that appeals
> to hackers because of its simplicity.  But Tcl syntax seems strange to most
> users.  If Tcl does become the "standard scripting language", users will
> curse it for years--the way people curse Fortran, MSDOS, Unix shell syntax,
> and other de facto standards they feel stuck with."

RMS is a hacker himself and he lives from his image as "nobodys darling" don't 
fall into that trap. John Ousterhout describes tcl as the glue that keeps 
applications together. He should know EDA better than RMS. He started magic, 
a layout editor. 

I think tcl is a very good replacement for guile.  I have programmed SKILL on 
Cadence and lisp in emacs and it is easier to forget the lisp syntax than the 
tcl syntax. Besides tcl have its use outside og gEDA as a way to quickly make 
small apps with a gui. pack a button, give it a command and every press of 
the button will give you a new netlist.

>
> As for the "random IT guy in a medium sized company has been asked to
> install gEDA on 100 Linux workstations.  What does he do? "
>
> It's easy he just types "emerge gschem" under Gentoo, or if he's using
> RedHat which business seem to love, he tpes "rpm -i gschem" ?

You make it sound easy. Have you been there, done that?

>
> How about a Knoppix based live-cd set up just for gEDA, and saving to a USB
> thumbdrive, local hard drive, or a network drive ?

What is the motivation for such a live-cd?  Don't forget that knoppix is 
debian and not gentoo.

>
> I for one hope Ales leaves gEDA exactly the way it is. I know it won't suit
> everyone, and it's impossible to please *everyone* anyway.

So far every discussion on guile vs. the rest of the world has had very little 
influence on Ales' work. Maybe because gEDA is so tightly married to guile 
that it is impossible to divide them. 
-- 
Svenn