Re: gEDA-user: merge multi symbol components

[Bill Gatliff <bgat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Doty wrote:
> It worries me that people are wiring their scenarios into the tools,  
> when gEDA's unique strength is its flexibility. This isn't limited to  
> gEDA: it seems to be a programming universal that people feel  
> obligated to turn simple, flexible toolkits into bloated, inflexible  
> "applications".
>   

I agree with you in principle.  But it would be nice for gEDA to work 
"out of the box" for the most basic cases, so that new users don't have 
to work very hard to see results.  I think it mostly does, except for 
its error detection abilities, and Kai-Martin is taking a stab at 
improving that.  It won't work for all workflows, but it will help some 
and future versions will help with more I'm sure.

I found gEDA pretty intimidating at first, because it has a 
bits-and-pieces feel to it.  Over time, I'm learning ways to take 
advantage of all those bits-and-pieces as I find more challenging 
problems to solve--- and grow less satisfied with bending my workflow to 
gEDA's "typical" (if you can apply that word to it at all) way of doing 
things.  And I'm finding that the tool is growing with me, which is 
fabulous.

Some of my adaptations, like not tying my symbol library to a particular 
project, finding a balance bettween "heavy" and "light" symbols that 
suits my needs, footprint issues, and so on, have been foreseen by 
others who could have provided a "best practices" set of recommendations 
for starting me out on the right path.  Those recommendations might not 
have made the first project go any smoother, but definitely would have 
helped the second, third, and so on.  Things like gedasymbols, Luciani's 
site, etc. fall into this category.  Without them to use as references, 
I would have struggled for much longer than I did.

I think the situation is a lot like with the Linux kernel: true, it's 
powerful code but it takes someone with a big-picture vision to really 
put that power to good use.  And there are different use cases and skill 
levels, hence all the different distributions that use modified Linux at 
their cores.  LaTeX and pstools are other examples.

I'm not suggesting that we need a gEDA "distribution" per se, but I bet 
there's a way to maintain all the flexibility that gEDA while at the 
same time improving the out-of-the-box experience.  I think that's an 
important context to view Kai-Martin's work in.


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
bgat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



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