Re: gEDA-user: why separate xgsch2pcb?

[Jason <geda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Clifton wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 10:57 -0500, Jason wrote:
> > Chris Cole wrote:
> > > Just curious, why not include xgsch2pcb functionality inside of gschem?
> > As an aside, the first thing that lept to mind, was the Unix philosophy 
> > of "one tool, one job."  So, I started digging to find where it came 
> > from.  It's one of those "quoted all over the place, but no origin to be 
> > found" kind of phrases.
> >
> > The best I could find was this [1], which sums it up nicely.
>
> That fits really well with a command-line approach. It really increases
> usability of the whole. I would also venture to suggest that this design
> philosophy has (probably) come about from a time when GUIs were not in
> common use.

True.

> With a GUI approach - the boundaries of the user interface do not need
> to match the logical boundaries of the operations involved. Things
> become more document oriented. Why should I load
> "open-office-print-spooler" when I can click the print button in my
> "open-office-text-editor" program?

Right, see my other email about the GUI being a scripted wrapper of CLI 
tools for a given workflow.

> IMO, the Unix philosophy can still apply - only you have to look deeper
> under the user-interface. Libraries, code abstraction and similar
> techniques play a part. Defined interfaces between separate programs are
> also important - such as the file-based forward-annotation interface
> between gschem and PCB.
>
> "libgerbv" is good at loading gerbv files. That means we could add that
> functionality to a number of other programs as convenient without
> re-inventing the wheel. We don't need (or want) separate GUI tools such
> as gbr2pcb gbr2lpr gbr2pdf gbr2ps, as might be sensible for UNIX command
> line tools. (NB. Such tools could probably be implemented quite
> trivially using libgerbv)

Agreed, code maintenance comes into play.  having libgerbv be the one 
spot for code to interact with gerber files make sense.

I've seen numerous times programmers abstracting just for the sake of 
abstracting.  eg one guy was 'refactoring' (a word I hate) his code so 
that you could open a file, or a TCP socket or a UDP socket with one 
function call.  My, "Why?" earned me a dumb look.

> > I personally don't use xgsch2pcb.  I run gsch2pcb from a Makefile, but 
> > that's my personal preference.  I prefer to script jobs that shouldn't 
> > need to be interactive.  ymmv.
>
> I use scripts a lot when working with text-based tasks, such as
> programming and building code. For gEDA, when working in a GUI, I find
> xgsch2pcb much more convenient than typing.
>
> Similarly with Lyx.. I let its GUI take care of building the right image
> formats and running pdflatex for me. I _could_ do it manually, but I
> find it much more convenient to hit the "preview PDF" button in the
> editor GUI.

Yeah, I tried four different CLI email clients and couldn't get them to 
work right for my email workflow.  I eventually settled on setting up an 
imap server and a vpn.  I've been using Thunderbird for years now with 
this setup.  It isn't ideal, but it does allow me to get my job done 
with minimal hassle.

thx,

Jason.


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