Re: gEDA-user: DRC vs shorted nets?

[John Griessen <john_g@cibolo.com>]

On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 15:44, harry eaton wrote:
> > Ok, but it would be nice if something gave the location of the short.
> Change
> > color, or X/Y points.
> 
> Yes, but as I point out, that is a very hard problem

[jg]It is a hard problem after the fact.  

There is a point when a short is happening 
that might be possible to alarm so you would be directed to check a potential problem.  
When a short is happening, and it is the "hard to debug" kind, two nets with more than a few 
parts have just touched.  If you set up a pseudo-netlist checker to run for every action taken,
but quickly, minimally, it might help.   For instance, the checker program that runs after every action
could look at whether more than 1/3 the nodes of the average net in the design were just added 
to this net...  that could be done without going through the whole netlist, just the local nodes
being worked on.  It could be fast.   

It could be a trigger for you choosing to run optimize, and so 
discovering "no trouble", or a new short.

I do something like that alarm mentally by choosing optimize every several path segments or footprints
put down or moved.  My mental method is just a short term memory counting awareness, so it takes
mental energy.  An alarm in code that tests conditions rather than counting would be far better.

John
-- 
John Griessen    Cibolo Design       Austin Texas, linux counter #249315