On May 17, 2011, at 7:45 AM, Russell Shaw wrote:
A well-stocked workshop is nothing more than a multitool workshop.
With that attitude, you'll botch the job.
There's no reason why a schematic and pcb editor can't have tight coupling
and still interact with all external tools.
The architectures are different. To flexibly interact with external tools,
you need the interfaces to be simple text files. Anything more complex is a
serious barrier, in general.
The only disadvantage to external tools is that an interface layer is
needed.
A separate piece of complex code for every interface, yes. This isn't too bad
in gEDA, because we don't try to integrate the diverse collection of
downstream tools with gschem: it's a pretty clean, simple flow.
The coupling could simply be an ipc protocol between separate programs.
Specialized IPC is good in its place. General-purpose IPC is complex,
fragile, and always less flexible than intended.