Re: gEDA-user: Slotting and visible power connections

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2008-11-05 at 16:44 -0800, Joerg wrote:
> Peter Clifton wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-11-05 at 09:33 -0800, Joerg wrote:
> >> Bernd Jendrissek wrote:
> > 
[snip]

> That is tough to understand for a non-programmer like me. If this means 
> that you can add power symbols onto packages at the first slot, yes, 
> that would work. Not sure about the database though. Heck, I don't even 
> know what SW pros mean by "fork" :-)

Sorry, its easy to get caught up in jargon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

Where software development paths have diverged. This often happens in
gEDA when people start working on new features. We start to call it a
fork when the amount of changes becomes non-trivial, and when they
aren't necessarily compatible with the main-line codebase. Sometimes
they get merged back ;), but often that requires a large effort on the
part of the developers involved.

[snip]

> The individual slots also show up as U?A, U?B and so on, maybe it would 
> be an idea to do that in gschem as well since it's industry practice.

PCB supports similar naming in the netlist (it ignores lower-case letter
suffixes), but some of the tools (gsch2pcb / gnetlist) would currently
be confused by that.

I did have a patch which made gnetlist ignore such suffixes, but it
broke a few corner cases (hierarchical schematics use the refdes on IO
pins as a key, and there was never any rules saying  lower-case suffixes
would be ignored.) Mostly for that reason (IIRC), it was generally
agreed that the patch should be reverted, and people using slots ought
to use refdes=U? type naming.

Nothing stops adding a "label=U?A" attribute, but perhaps something more
automated could be thought up.

You're encountering some of the down sides to gEDA's great flexibility.
Since there are so many possible conventions, ways this "could" work,
work-flows (which all might have special rules for refdes), hard-coding
automatic behaviours becomes a difficult decision to take.

I did produce a scheme hook script (like a plugin) once which resets
component names back to U? or whatever when you copy-paste blocks. It
might be possible to produce a similar plugin for auto-numbering things.


-- 
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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