gEDA-user: Flattening the gafrc information

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Folks,

Within its limits, gnetlist is a wonderful, flexible processor of  
gEDA design data, often underappreciated. But once one bumps up  
against gnetlist's limits, design automation becomes much more  
difficult. It seems to me that much of this difficulty could be  
avoided by preprocessing schematics for gnetlist. The gEDA file  
format is well designed for this: easily processed by a wide variety  
of tools and scripting systems. The various refdes renumberers and  
symbol generators exhibit gEDA's success here.

However, there's a big barrier: while the design files are easy to  
process, the system/project configuration files (*gafrc and friends)  
are not. Even to find them, one needs information buried in libgeda,  
and the configuration files themselves are, in fact, scheme programs  
that make use of undocumented libgeda functions. Interpreting these  
is just about impossible for anything except a C utility based on  
libgeda. Some processing one might want to do, e.g. controlled  
hierarchy expansion, requires knowledge of this information. Such  
processing is currently impractical in gEDA, at least in the general  
case.

I have therefore written a gnetlist back end that extracts this  
information and reformats it in tool-friendly TSV format. It doesn't  
pick up everything (I doubt anything but gschem needs colormap info,  
for example), but it grabs the main variables and, most importantly,  
the library paths. If someone asks me to add other parameters (and in  
the nontrivial cases proposes a TSV encoding) I'll be glad to add  
them. At the moment, it handles:

attribute-promotion
keep-invisible
promote-invisible
always-promote-attributes
component-library
component-library-search
source-library
source-library-search

Install the attached file in your gEDA/scheme directory. Then, a  
command like:

gnetlist -g flatten-gafrc -o gafrc.tsv /dev/null

will create gafrc.tsv for your further scripting pleasure. Have fun!  
Bug reports welcome...

Attachment: gnet-flatten-gafrc.scm
Description: Binary data

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



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