Re: gEDA-user: Investigating gEDA for commercial use

[Duncan Drennan <duncan.drennan@xxxxxxxxx>]

> fwiw, pcb and gerbv release snapshots have had windows installers to go
> with them for the last several snapshots.  On the gerbv end things Just
> Work (as far as I know).  On the pcb end, we do have an issue with the
> way the m4 generated footprints end up named in pcblib-newlib.
> Basically, they are not uniquely named and that causes some issues.  I
> haven't had time to work with it.  The other known pain about pcb under
> windows is the only path to printing is postscript output and then you
> need ghostscript to convert to pdf for printing under windows.

I've been working with the gEDA toolchain on windows for about 6
months now. The only issue with gschem that I picked up is that the
refdes renumbering tool does not seem to work (refdes_renum is a perl
script, and the grenum didn't work correctly - I just drop back to
cygwin to renumber schematics). My desired output is typically PDF, so
the postscript path works happily for me (but would have to be fixed
for a proper release version).

> gaf (gschem, gnetlist, and friends) I think have an extra level of
> challenge which is gnetlist is by design a command line utility so you
> need some sort of shell.  I suspect under cygwin its not so tough to
> make it all work, but this is not the fully self contained windows
> installer that many users want.

The command line stuff can easily be hidden with a thin layer of GUI
if it is really necessary. I really like the flexibility that I can
build into a makefile to run all the different commands.

Installing cygwin and getting it up and running is actually very easy
(just follow the wiki instructions). One "issue" for me with that is
that it creates another barrier for entry - you already have to deal
with migration paths and so on, now you also have to deal with
figuring out how to get it installed. If the installation barrier is
gone it is one point less against gEDA. Another issue is that if I
have a client who wants to manipulate the files the installation
process is more complicated than, "Here is the installer, here are the
files."

If it was a relatively simple process to compile it all into a binary
I would probably do it myself on a regular basis just to keep up to
date with the latest changes (which also makes it easier to report
bugs). I tried grabbing Cesar's minipack and running it (under
cygwin), but there was a failure when fetching the files.
Unfortunately I don't really have the time to figure it out, and think
it might be more efficient (for me at least) to pay someone to do it.
Figuring out how to build the latest versions of gEDA is pretty low on
my priorities list.


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