Re: gEDA-user: KJWaves - new release (a r)

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I have read all the comments and, sadly, they were mostly as I expected.
>
> The reason why I have drifted toward this topic is that I hoped you
> would be interested in needs of ASIC industry engineers, so you could
> improve some of gschem characteristics and make it more popular in
> this environment.

> Again, what I would like gschem to have is:
> - a coherent design database, preferably with an API for a script
> language (scheme is fine),
> - parametrized device symbols ready to use with typical ASIC flows,
> - strong support for hierarchical designs,
> - responsive UI (retained-mode canvas etc),
> - sane defaults (autonumbering instances etc)

Hmmmmm, I can appreciate your interest in using gEDA for your own work
in designing ASICs.  We also appreciate feedback since it helps us
gauge what kind of work we might want to do next.  Finally, some of
the features you suggest are indeed of interest to the community
at large.

However, I should point out that gEDA is developed by skilled,
professional engineers who work on it as a hobby, without pay.  That's
why it's free (as in no-cost) to you.  But that's also why the feature
set reflects their needs, and not yours.

If you really want an open-source alternative to the $150K,
secret-source ASIC development platforms on the market, then you are
strongly encouraged to translate talk into action in one of the
following ways:

*  Sit down and write the features yourself.  We are always responsive
to new features contributed as patches.

*  Put your money to work and hire some open-source programmers to
implement the features for you.  Indeed, there are several hot
programmers on this e-mail list who do contract work and are already
familiar with the code base.  Why not put one of them to work?

*  Assuming that you are in a company designing ASICs, then you may
have folks on staff who are skilled in the art of writing C programs.
Put one of them to work on implementing your desired features.
Alternately, hire some summer students to work on gEDA while at
your company.

*  Finally, if you are in contact with academia, then convince an EE
professor to take on students who can implement your features into
gEDA as part of their university work.  The folks at Cambridge
University did just that, and the results have been outstanding!

> Finally, I consider gschem a fine program, assuming your target users
> are component-level electronics designers in an academia environment
> or electronics geeks.

That's what gEDA started as, that's where the (current) developer
interst lies, and that's what it remains.  However, gEDA is always
open to growing in new directions through the active input of
developers.  But *you* need to step up to the plate and do something
about it.

Cheers,

Stuart



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