Re: gEDA-user: PCB: Connecting Nets by hand

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

> Well, I have to say, I am positively disappointed with PCB in its entirety.

That's not good. . . .  :-(

> First, the nets I'm trying to connect are (a) all connected in the
> schematic, and (b) not being fed between pins.  Second, while
> hand-routing the design, I used cut-n-paste to replicate the bulk of
> the circuit.  This worked pretty well, but after discovering an error,
> I went back to gschem to correct the error.  After running gsch2pcb,
> it refused to generate a new pcb file, despite a pretty significant
> change.  

What was the error, and do you have more details about why gsch2pcb
wouldn't export a .pcb.new file?

> So, I basically have to delete everything in my PCB
> directory, and start over from scratch.

One issue with PCB is that it lacks the ability to do backannotation
into gschem.  That is, it would be nice if one could make small
changes in the layout (e.g. pin swapping), and then be able to run a
program (called "gbackanno", say) which would read the .pcb file & the
.sch file, and then output a .sch file which wrote the new
connectivity info into the .sch file.

This requires some re-architecting of the .sch file format and file
parser in libgeda.  We've talked about that on this list 
before. . . .  

Of course, such a tool might not help you with backannotating major
changes -- like yours -- into gschem.

> I'm pretty upset.  There were a number of other "gotchas" during the
> use of the software that I positively hated too.  I wish I'd written
> them down.

Actually, it would help us help you if you could create a list of
problems you encountered while learning PCB.  Some of the issues may
simply be related to lack of documentation, and some of them may be
bugs/misfeatures in PCB.  If you posted such a list, it would help
concentrate the minds of developers onto which issues need fixing.

Stuart