Re: gEDA-user: Investigating gEDA for commercial use

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Smith wrote:
> Thanks to all who responded, on- and off-list.  My boss took a good look
> at gEDA over the weekend and, while he's very impressed with the tools,
> he believes CadStar or Altium are a better fit for us at this point.
> Obviously I'm disappointed, but at least I tried. :)
> 
> As a Linux user this puts me in an unfortunate situation, as neither of
> the above tools has a Linux version.  This means I will have to try one
> of three options:
> 
> 1. use gschem for capture (I won't be doing layout), producing suitable
> output for CadStar/Altium PCB layout -- unlikely, I think, as it will
> only be one-way so things like back annotation probably won't work;
> 
> 2. use CadStar/Altium under WINE; or
> 
> 3. use CadStar/Altium in a VMWare/VirtualBox session.
> 
> I know I'm heading off-topic here, but I'd appreciate hearing from
> anyone who has tried any of the above, whether successful or not.

I have not used CadStar/Altium.  Many years ago I used gschem as the 
schematic front end for PADS layout and I was able to do some amount of 
back annotation.  Google for pads_backannotate.  As far as I know 
nothing is in place to do the same for CadStar/Altium.  I think it 
largely depends on what the mechanism is for doing that.  PADS does it 
by taking a schematic netlist (produced by gnetlist) and a layout 
netlist (produced by PADS) and producing an engineering change order 
(.ECO) file that basically says what has to happen to make one netlist 
be like the other.  So it is used for both forward and backward 
annotation.  Then you use the pads_backannotate script to apply the .ECO 
file to the gschem schematic.  Note that not all features were 
implemented.  Some were and others simply give you instructions telling 
what you must manually change.  It helped that the PADS .ECO file was 
documented.

-Dan



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