Re: gEDA-user: Collaborative Development of Boards

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 13:50 +0100, Markus Hitter wrote:

> As you mentioned one of the differences is the inspection of changes,  
> but there's another one. Track positions are more like the  
> programmer's object data, than like source code. So they can change  
> often, and often without the intent to change functionality of the  
> layout.

What about extracting the _topology_ of the tracks (probably using /
refactoring some code from the topological auto-router).

It should not be too hard to produce a "same / different" output from
comparing to topologies, without caring about he minutiae of every
coordinate along the way.

Producing a useful "diff" view would be harder of course.

> One solution would be to not store track positions at all, but always  
> generate them with an autorouter on the fly. As long as autorouters  
> aren't as full-featured as compilers in the software world, this  
> isn't an option, though. Future music :-)

This is an interesting idea. Auto-routing to match a particular topology
would be feasible, even if a full auto-route from scratch would not be.

The topological auto-router can do this. The hard part of auto-routing
is generating an efficient topology to use.

> > there's never a version where the changelog says "Deleted 20 unused  
> > features. Patched 300 memory leaks. No new features added".
> 
> Sure there are. Actually, they're my favourite ;-)

For my money, it sounds like there should have been at least 21 commits
there, if not 320. ;)

Still - PCB designs are more like deployed web-software.. very linear in
their development, and diverging branches don't make a lot of sense.
PCBs are of course harder, as it becomes harder to partition and
segregate areas of conflict so individual changes could be reverted.

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)
Tel: +44 (0)1223 748328 - (Shared lab phone, ask for me)



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