Re: gEDA-user: Distributed Symbols for Complex Devices(like Processors). How?

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 20, 2010, at 10:34 AM, kai-martin knaak wrote:

> John Doty wrote:
> 
>> It is absolutely not a workaround: it is the way a well-factored system
>> works.
>> 
>> Go to the board and write 1000 times "The schematics are only a modest
>> part of the documentation".
> 
> Go to the board and write a 1000 times: 
> "An UI is meant to give access to commonly needed actions"
> Printing every sheet in a hierarchy is surely a common need.

The common need is "perform action X on every sheet".

> Note, that it 
> is  "UI",  not "GUI".
> 
> 
>> What gschem can easily do is provide graphics representing a schematic
>> page. What it has no business attempting is assembling those graphics,
>> text, TeX, tabular data, simulation results, etc. into a document. 
> 
> I am not talking about assembly to a valid documentation, but about the 
> production of the parts and pieces. That is, graphics representation of the 
> schematics, formated in a way other tools can deal with (EPS, PNG, ...)

And gschem does that just fine. If it were to wad them up into a single file, that would make most uses harder.

> 
> 
>> There are other tools for this.
> 
> To output all sheets of a hierarchical design, some entity has to parse the 
> schematics for included sub sheets. Currently, this entity is the user, or a 
> sophisticated script written by the user. 

Yes. There is a missing factor. gEDA is factored better than the competition, but it still could use improvement. Every kludge added to handle some special case makes future factoring harder.

But automating this seems a very minor productivity improvement. It's not like it's time consuming to keep track of this by hand, merely a trivial annoyance. And it can't be fully automated in any case: merely following the netlisting hierarchy only works in simple cases.

The strength of gEDA is that it supports high productivity approaches, and that there is little fog hiding them. Want to print schematics as part of documentation? Add the following to your Makefile:

S2PS=gschem -p -o $@ -s print.scm $<

%.sym.ps : %.sym
        $(S2PS)

%.ps : %.sch
        $(S2PS)

Not so hard.

Now write a rule that combines the PostScript schematics, including other files as needed, that meets *your project's* needs.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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