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

[Terry Porter <techman@d2.net.au>]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 17:02:26 +0100
Svenn Are Bjerkem <svenn@bjerkem.de> wrote:

> 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 have to admit that I don't understand this "port or die" attitude. Neither Linux or gEDA
seem to have any terminal health problems to me, so what am I missing here ?

Why will any GPL program die if its not rewritten to suit Windows ?

In the gase of OSX, people are already running gschem and even PCB I believe,
as no real work is needed to "port" to that OS.

>I am now a Mac / linux / windows user and I 
> can't agree less with you.

I'm an ex Windows user, tho I have little Mcc experience.

> 
> >
> > 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. 

What 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. 

And RMS gave us Free Software, Gcc ,Emacs and many other programs. Sure he's abrasive
but I agree with his philosophy and lets not forget that without Gcc, the world would be
a different place. What do you use to compile Tk/Tcl and Magic with ?

And what does it cost ?

> 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.

I guess experiences differ, however I'm no hacker and never will be, I'm an electronics
guy myself. I do simple C programming for embedded, and have written a few apps in Python
but I just didnt "click" with Tk/Tcl myself.

I would definetly rather learn Guile if I *had* to.

> 
> >
> > 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?

Sure on both counts. In 1994 I used to maintain Windows boxes for a number of small companies
and I'll take RedHats "dependency hell" over Windows anyday. At least RedHat is Linux and remote
admin is *easy* with Linux.

> 
> >
> > 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?

The ability to design in gEDA and PCB etc on any INTEL box regardless of what OS is installed
permanently on it. A user can put in the CD, reboot and be designing in a couple of minutes.

>  Don't forget that knoppix is 
> debian and not gentoo.

Thats cool with me, I have created many packages for both distros. Debian has no problems with gEDA.

> 
> >
> > 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. 

Perhaps Guile works well enough for Ales that he sees no profit in redesigning it to suit another
tool to replace Guile ?

In the end, gEDA is GPL'd, and anyone who likes can take the source and fork off a version that
uses TCL, so in many ways this discussion won't change anything.

Ales has done a *monumental* quantity of work to get gEDA to where it is today, and I've had the 
pleasure of upgrading to his newer versions many times since 1998 (thanks Ales, you rule!), and I've *never* had any problems running gEDA on Slackware, Debian, Source-Mage, Sorcerer, RedHat, Mandrake
and now Gentoo. Of course they're all Linux distros and Linux distros are basically Linux anyway.

As far as porting to Windows, I can't see the point as Windows is a proprietary arena, there is no source code (generally), and there are many differences in the way things work. In fact many OSS ports of Unix apps just don't have the same functionality on Windows.

A very popular port of Avr-Gcc to Windows using the Cygnus tools, called WinAvr is now in limbo,
the maintainer has called it a day for some reason, and afaik no one is picking it up. As a result
WinAvr is now way behind and the Windows users don't like it, but they're not taking over the workload either (afaik).

Compare this to gEDA where many people have written apps like BOM's ( I think we are up to 5 different ones now), and netlisters etc and they seem to just keep coming.

In contrast to your opening statement, I think that any gEDA Windows port *will* die.
 

> -- 
> Svenn
> 
> 


-- 
Kind Regards
Terry
* See my Gnu/Linux EDA webpage at : http://milkstone.d2.net.au/             
* Free Software provided by GNU; http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html