Re: gEDA-user: How to deal with single/dual parts?

[Kelvin Gardiner <kelvin@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,


Since I emailed about including multiple footprints in symbol files. 
I've been following the subsequent discussions. I thought the view of a 
new-ish user of geda maybe helpful, I mean to give some constructive 
criticism and not to be derogatory to the project or any person. If I've 
made a incorrect presumption fell free to give me a slap.


I understand geda has many design flows. Taking a PCB flow as an 
example. Many other tools do a better job of handling component 
selection and creation, as has been mentioned. I don't think the option 
of each user scripting symbol creation and similar solutions is sensible 
option for action new users. I have reasonable EDA and programming 
experience and have written scripts for VLSI designs using Synopsys and 
Cadence tools. I can write scripts, but I'm think of new EDA tools users 
in schools / colleges or (newer) hobbyists, that just want to produce a 
schematic and PCB easily. Other tools such as the free version of Eagle 
(yes it has limitations and not all of the design flows geda supports) 
does a better job of this. I don't see why geda can't to a equal good 
job. I may suggest that in rightly wanting to keep the flexibility of 
geda some of the usability for some specific flows has suffered.

It seems that there is general agreement that something is broke, with 
the finger being pointed towards the current symbol file and slotting 
mechanism. It also seem the cleanest proposed solutions require a 
reasonable change to the code base that will take some time to complete. 
One idea maybe to have a parallel development branch to explore 
solutions that can be merged back with the main branch at a later date 
(may after several releases).
 
The ease of using of multiple files for symbols / components depends on 
how this is presented to the user, if combing the additional files is 
done through some GUI options that partially hides this, I don't see 
much of a problem.

This discussion has also raised other points, such as the API and the 
API docs. Maybe a meeting or two on IRC or with Gobby to flesh out some 
solutions might help (I find the more instant response of IRC is better 
than mailing lists for this type of thing, maybe others don't). Maybe 
with a view of what to implement in the next couple of versions, more 
towards big picture ideas than the current todo list.

On a bit of a different note. It would be nice to search gedasymols.org 
directly form the library manager for additional symbols / components.

Regards,
Kelvin

Dan McMahill wrote:
> Peter TB Brett wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:51:49 -0700, John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>     
>>> The bottom line question for the core developers is:
>>>
>>> What prevents us from writing a file of Guile functions and adding a  
>>> line to gafrc to load it and get this functionality?
>>>       
>> The gschem/libgeda Scheme API:
>>
>> - Is completely inconsistent in naming and calling pattern.
>>
>> - Has no useful documentation.
>>
>> - Lacks the ability to do meaningful manipulation of schematics/symbols.
>>
>> - Fails dismally at coping with having multiple schematics/symbols open at
>> once.
>>
>> - Barely deserves to be described as an "API".
>>     
>
> I have to concur.  Having used a commercial tool quite a bit with a very 
> powerful api, we are really not there.  Not by a long shot.
>
>
>
>
>
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>   



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