Re: gEDA-user: General Layers questions

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 18, 2011, at 4:07 PM, DJ Delorie wrote:

> 
>> That's the kind of "top down" design that produces a tool that meets
>> today's requirements in the minimum amount of time, but produces an
>> inflexible tool limited to those requirements.
> 
> And your kind of bottom-up design never gets done at all, because of
> impossible-to-meet requirements for unlimited flexibility.

Absolutely not. The right kind of flexibility is even more important to the developers than to the users.

> 
>> But if you start from a data representation that spans the space of
>> the possible, it drives you toward flexibility and extensibility in
>> the upper layers.
> 
> The problem is, "the space of the possible" is infinitely large, and
> we have a very small finite set of developers.  Unless we know how the
> tool is going to be used, we don't even know what "the space of the
> possible" *is*.

In your sense, you have no idea what the "space of the possible" is for the integers. Yet all integers can be represented by strings of two digits. Not much of a developer burden.

Ales did an incredible job of representing the "space of the possible" for schematics with a very clean bottom level. The troublesome issues in gEDA come from upper levels that fail to respect its generality. But there are far fewer issues there than there are with pcb.

Good, clean, simple, highly general foundations can *drastically reduce* the burden on the developer (been there). The most common cause of bad foundations, in my experience, is limited vision.

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




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