Re: gEDA-user: GAttrib refdes appends '.'

[Dan Sandberg <dan.sandberg.lists@xxxxxxxxx>]

> In an effort to clean up our parts libararies, our diligent developers
> have been adding the "numslots" attribute to all components, including
> things like single caps & resistors.  In the case of single parts,
> numslots=0, which turns off slotting.  However, since gattrib is
> triggered off the presence of the "numslots", and not its value, it
> appends the ".".  All this happens in gattrib/src/s_attrib.c at the
> bottom of the file.
>
>   

Cool, thanks for the answer.

Why was it decided that numslots should be added to every component
rather than making the tools default to zero?

It seems strange to specify in EVERY component that something is not 
there. IE, it would be weird for every capacitor to have "numA2D=0" or
"numRAMBytes=0".

> Gattrib has a manual???
>
>   

http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/gattrib/

Is as close as it gets I think.

> FWIW, this is another reason to be wary of "heavy" symbols: Users may
> be unaware of strange or unknown attributes lurking in the symbol, and
> those symbol-level attributes might do things which the naive user [1]
> doesn't expect or understand.


What's the crux of the heavy/light argument?  Why can't a symbol file
have a light description, and an associated heavy description in a 
separate file, and have it so when a user adds the component, she 
chooses which 'heavy' attributes to include?  Granted I've been using 
gEDA for three days and have no idea what I'm talking about, but isn't 
light/heavy a false choice?

Cheers,

-Dan