Re: gEDA-user: Database on symbols, footprints and other (was "Re: gattrib")

[Britton Kerin <britton.kerin@xxxxxxxxx>]

   On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 7:04 AM, John Doty <[1]jpd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

   On May 2, 2010, at 11:41 PM, Britton Kerin wrote:
   >  I use a probably almost identical project symbol approach.  If this
   is
   >   high-productivity way I'd hate to see the alternative.
   Essentially,
   >   everybody gets to continually reinvent the same heavy symbols.  Its
   got
   >   to be possible to do better than this.

     Reinvent the same symbols? Nah. There are trillions of possibilities
     for heavy symbols. It's unlikely two independently developed
     projects would have much in common here. Even my own projects tend
     not to have much overlap: different customers, different
     requirements, even different project phases.

   How much really changes for a chip resistor or SOIC uc?  These things
   should take ZERO effort to get something pretty in gschem that will
   work with pcb.  If people care about the exact mask settings and such
   they can tweak.

     I don't know about you, but customizing pre-existing symbols takes
     me very little time compared to the rest of the design process.
     Creating new ones from scratch takes more time, but between the gEDA
     library and [2]gedasymbols.org, there's often a starting point for
     anything truly common.

   If you have a reference design that you're trying to modify or extend
   getting a working set of symbols takes most
   of the time.  And reference designs are the open source way.

     If people were reinventing the same heavy symbols, there'd be a high
     probability of finding a suitable heavy symbol on
     [3]gedasymbols.org. In practice, I find those symbols almost always
     need customization. But of course this shouldn't be surprising.

   Interestingly, I've looked at [4]gedasymbols.org briefly before and
   failed to find most of its content, since its hiding
   under the names of the contributors and in the search field.  I
   concluded it had ended up as a footprint library.
   I'd suggest the following (heck I'll do it if someone wants to give me
   access):
     * Put the whole ball of symbols tarball under a Download section.
     * Or at least put the cvs checkout incantation somewhere on the
   page.  I'm assuming you can check it all out
       without an account?  Oh in fact poking around more I find this
   information under "ask for a CVS account" link.
       Again I'd be happy to clean this page up a bit.
   Britton

References

   1. mailto:jpd@xxxxxxxxx
   2. http://gedasymbols.org/
   3. http://gedasymbols.org/
   4. http://gedasymbols.org/


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