Re: gEDA-user: General Layers questions

[Steven Michalske <smichalske@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 18, 2011, at 3:07 PM, DJ Delorie <dj@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
> 
Wow all my bottom up designs in shipping products must not exist....  A few million users disagree.  Top down and bottom up are a preference, not set in stone.  FWIW I use both methods.  My diagnostic tools start by me normally building small useful functions that get then assembled into larger functions.  The team working on the top down diagnostics gave up after my bottom up design for lab testing  was doing all that they planned and more. To top the cake, they implemented a feature that they were expecting to take two weeks in about 45 minutes because my bottoms up design had functions that were the bulk of what they needed.

>> 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*.
> 
> 
Being an engineer is partly knowing when enough is ready to ship.  Bottom up designs do have high level goals,  it's our job to keep feature creep at a minimum. 

As far as I know I have only asked for file format requirements that are used in current technology mass-produced boards and for extra data to allow the manufacturing and simulation to be enhanced.

Layer materials and diamentions to allow impedance measurement in object reports 

Steve


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