Harry Eaton wrote:
I'm not going to stop working on the toporouter (greenlight?) just
because Google didn't fund us. If people keep hassling me, I'll
probably
find the time for small commits here and there.. e.g., most of my
work
last year was an answer to some scathing criticism from Harry.. I
*had*
to do something after that =)
Gosh, I was thinking about making a parody of your website comparing
the two routers in pcb, where I would show test cases where boards had
SMD parts on both sides and the toporouter couldn't route it but the
autorouter could, then some with some existing hand-routing on the
board, one with a ground plane going unused by the toporouter, etc. But
I thought that would be mean so I didn't do it. (Even though I figured
it would goad you in to fixing those problems).
Haha, don't worry, I can handle it.. I'm sure I would have had a "come back".. But yes, in retrospect the website is crap.. I would like to replace it with a script that automatically generates the website (including all the images and results) each time I change the algorithms.
I do stand by my decision to spend more effort on single layer performance before implementing vias though. My single layer performance improved considerably, for example on Windell's MeggyJr board, the wiring was reduced by over 30 inches by some changes. Not only that, *many* bugs were eliminated as I worked on single layers only.. those bugs would have been much harder to fix if the situation were complicated with vias. I actually found it a little frustrating that I was simultaneously being told by some people to implement vias, but also to spend time stabilizing and fixing existing code.. I just couldn't please everybody!
Seriously, I didn't think my criticisms were scathing, they were meant to be helpful. In any event, I'm still happy to give my blunt assessment and crazy ideas going forward.
Sorry, scathing was the wrong word.. What I meant was the criticism was well targeted and straight to the point (because of your knowledge of the internals of autorouters), which was hugely helpful (even if I didn't agree.. it was great to talk about the issues). In the cases where I didn't agree, I felt I needed to prove it, and that was the motivation for most of my commits last year. Thanks Harry =)
Cheers, Anthony _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user