Re: gEDA-user: PCB suggestion

[Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 2.  I think we will use PCB for a long time coming yet.  You might
> experience difficulty selling your idea to the F/OSS  Fundis, who
> don't like anything commercial.  Moreover, although there is a lot of
> talk about new features for PCB, I suspect that there is not that much
> development activity in this direction.  Finally, one of PCB's nice 
> features is that the file format is (sort of) well documented, and is

I would rather say "the file format PCB used about year ago is well documented".

I have written some doc patches and put them on sourceforge and they weren't
incorporated yet. I am starting to worry about forgetting where I have the
patched version of the doc and one nice shiny day removing the whole -patched
ource tree, therefore flushing my previous doc patch work down the toilet.

Therefore I better not patch the doc anymore and wait until the patches
emerge on pcb.sourceforge.net ;-)

> easy to process & script (as you know).   (As for documentation, Steve
> Meier has a nice doc describing it, and he and I have worked up a next
> rev which is currently waiting for the PCB developers to look at and
> check.) 
> 
> Since a new F/OSS PCB layout package is probably a long way off, we
> are left with PCB for the forseeable future.  Perhaps an easy project

Does making another free software PCB layout tool make sense?

> is to create a file translator which takes the Board Station database
> & converts it to PCB format.  This would be a first step, and would

Yes. I don't think adopting existing proprietary-roots fileformats is a good
idea.
Compare:
PNG vs. GIF
Ogg Vorbis vs. MP3

Cl<