Re: gEDA-user: gEDA and pcb status and minigration from Eagle

[Ineiev <ineiev@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/12/09, Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> like style with fancy pretty 3d windows (e.g., KDE) to a minimalistic design
> and the command-line (e.g., awesome wm).

My favourite is ratpoison.

> I killed more and more
> proprietary programs and replaced bloated GUI-programs by "KISS"(keep it
> simple stupid)-versions.

Thank you both for the former and for the latter.

> Now, it is time to look again into EDA.
>
> Initially, I believe that according to my work habits, gEDA and pcb might be
> more suitable to me then KiCad. However, I can not see the ongoing usage and
> development of this projects in the near future. I saw actual releases for
> both packages but do not know whether there is really an active development
> in progress.

It is, and it's very intensive; for details, you can look at the GIT
logs and gEDA mailing lists archives.

> Package management systems of different distributions ship rather
> old
> versions and the blogosphere and Internet is rather quite about this
> packages.

Many people on this list are used to build gEDA programs from sources,
either released or GIT heads.

> Furthermore, can I do all the stuff I was used to do in eagle with gEDA and
> pcb
> ?
> Are there any shortcuts or limitations ?

Any program has limitations. I don't feel competent in
other parts of gEDA (the toolset covers an area which is too wide for me);
for PCB the most essential are (of course,
this is just my deeply personal opinion):

* some lack of layers flexibility (no blind and buried vias,
same design rules for all layers, limited quantity and
functions of non-copper layers)

* texts in non-latin scripts are not supported; there may be only
one font per board

* some complicated features should be used with caution;
e.g. sometimes polygons may disappear when you move from one
part of the board to another or even produce a segmentation fault

You can ask here if you want to know about a particular feature.

> How mature and stable are the suite yet ?
> Can it be really considered for serious work ?

I think these are questions you should answer youself after testing
the programs.
There are people on this list (and I believe, off this list)
who do use these programs for serious work;
nobody can tell you if you'll want to use them for your particular design.

> As for me I have no problem to get my hand dirty and crawl around in config-
> files and text-files. I even will love to see that maybe one or another task
> can
> be done by simply writing some text-files in emacs (or vi to avoid a war).
> For Eagle, I liked the little command line at the bottom of the window,
> which
> allowed me to type in comments rather then clicking and searching around in
> GUI-settings. If there is something like this in gschem or pcb I would be
> happy to use it.

It is: AFAIK gschem uses guile; in PCB the scripting abilities are not so rich;
as another way, processing PCB files with sed/awk/perl is used.

There were a plugin written by igor2 <igor2@xxxxxxxxxxx>
(http://archives.seul.org/geda/user/May-2009/msg00371.html)
to integrate PCB with many different languages like
python and lua, though I can't provide any details about it.

HTH; probably, someone else will answer better than me,
Ineiev


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