Re: gEDA-user: PCB suggestion

[Daniel Nilsson <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 10:30:51AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Jan 8, 2005, at 12:18 PM, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> >2.  The biggest reason to not use XML is that we already have a
> >working file format with associated file reading and writing code.
> >Transitioning to XML is a major, architectural change to PCB.
> >Everybody talks about changing the program; almost nobody actually
> >implements the changes.  If I had my druthers for PCB, I'd rather see
> >developer effort used to upgrade the UI to GTK, rather than wasted on
> >migrating to an XML file format -- a change which would be invisible
> >to ordinary users.
> 
>   While I'd certainly like to see some look & feel improvements in the 
> basic UI elements, I think GTK would be a mistake.  Contrary to popular 
> belief, all the world is *not* a PC running Linux, and GTK can be a 
> cast-iron pain in the ass on anything but.
> 

Dave,

While working on fixing the problems with the mode buttons only
working on some combinations of X and window managers I realized how
old the Athena Widgets are by now. As other people noticed, finding
good documentation is a little hard but more importantly getting help
is not easy at all. I asked for help in a few related newsgroups but
the answers I got were not terribly helpful.

I think another aspect that certainly applied to me was that my
interest for spending hours trying to understand how the Athena
Widgets work just to fix a stupid bug felt like a waste of
time. Spending that time on GTK+ though I felt was more rewarding
because I could actually use that for new program development.

I reached the conclusion that for PCB to survive in the long term a
GUI based on a more modern widget set then the Athena widets will
probably be required. This is in order to attract new developers to
have an interest in improving and expanding the GUI. Doing a little
research and following similar discussions on the GTK list I think
baseing a layout program on the GnomeCanvas would be fairly
straightforward and should give good performance. I have had plans for
a while now to write a simple "proof of concept" GUI for PCB based on
this but it seems like you would disagree that this is the right
path. So my question is to you (and others), you you think there is a
need for a new GUI and what widget set should it be based on in that
case (besides GTK+ and the Gnome widgets) ?

-- 
Daniel Nilsson