Re: gEDA-user: Ammeter and voltmeter symbols

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2008-05-04 at 20:19 -0700, David Griffith wrote:
> On Sun, 4 May 2008, Peter Clifton wrote:

> > Breakage aside, library maintenance is a huge and potentially boring
> > task not many people seem to want to do.. we may never clean it up!

> Suppose M4 library support is discontinued in favor of newlib.  What
> potential troubles would be caused?  How feasable would a conversion
> script be?  On the problems of breakage, I think the benefits outweigh the
> drawbacks.  The M4 library will keep accumulating cruft otherwise.

I thought we were talking about gschem symbols, gschem doesn't use M4 at
all.

PCB used to use M4 for (all?) its footprints, but now many are just
shipped in their raw output format "newlib". The PCB build process now
actually makes a newlib copy of all M4 footprints it knows about,
installing as pcblib-newlib. (Necessary for a win32 port where launching
M4 won't work - certainly not easily).

There are a few drawbacks, not as much information is listed in the
filenames of the converted footprints, and there are still a few name
clashes which mean you don't get some footprints in the converted
output.

As you suggest though, the PCB library could probably benefit from some
cleanup too.

> I think we should embark on a yearlong project to assemble and verify a
> basic symbol set.  Each person would be assigned n symbols, and
> potentially more if they want.  We could start with identifying what
> should be in the set.  There are a lot of needless duplicates in there
> now.

I was wondering about some kind of web-based symbol / footprint review
database, we can upload the existing sets, and mark them as needing
review. If we had a way to categorise how good symbols are, and mark
them as reviewed etc.. then we could all help. Someone would have to
decide the desired library content for the shipped gEDA / PCB tools
though.

> > Since these meters are quite common items, I guess there is more chance
> > we can include them (assuming they are appropriately licensed
> > (http://geda.seul.org/license.html)
> 
> That won't be a problem.

Cool, lets see what Ales says about getting them included.

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)



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