Re: gEDA-user: Parts Manager Working Document

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On the chat, you wrote:

> On configuration directories, gEDA has the config directory and the  
> data directory.  The parts manager needs to locate the system-gafrc  
> and the subdirectories for models, symbols, footprints, etc...

It's not just that it has to locate *gafrc: it has to extract the  
data from them. These are not straightforward data files. They are in  
fact Guile programs that depend on functions in libgeda.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a gnetlist back end to extract the data. See:

http://www.seul.org/pipermail/geda-user/2009-December/022135.html

Perhaps gnetlist should be called gEDAscript, as it is the general- 
purpose scripting wrapper around libgeda. It isn't just for netlists.

Let me also express my preference for something for a simple, trivial  
mechanism that gets most of this job done rather that an impossible  
attempt to be all things to all people. The first thing you should do  
when designing a database is to estimate the labor required to do  
data entry.

The gEDA community has mustered the resources to publish fewer than  
3000 symbols, between the shipped library and gedasymbols.org, in ten  
years. That's not a complaint: I think this is actually a pretty good  
accomplishment (and I am extremely grateful). But the problem is huge  
(and changing, expanding rapidly) while the resources are orders of  
magnitude smaller. The mismatch is worse with your database, I think.

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




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