Re: gEDA-user: Hierarchy viewer and database proposal

[sdb@cloud9.net (Stuart Brorson)]

[ . . . .  snip! . . . . .]
> But in a schematic, a part may have no such attributes (your case), so
> the backend will never know about this. This is why it complains if you
> have parts with no slot and numslots attributes defined.
> When placing a part, there are attributes which are defined
> automatically, like refdes. I think that defining automatically numslots
> and slot when placing a part will be an excellent solution, for both the
> user and the backends. This is what I suggested, and Ales says he will
> think about it...

Personally, I am not in favor of requiring that numslots be defined
for each part.   I prefer the minimalist approach:  the various tools
should just work with the minimum number of attributes required.
Requiring attributes over the most basic ones (DEVICE, REFDES) for
proper operation of a tool is a PITA.  

Therefore, I'd rather just put the (define action-unused-slots \#c)
into a file to be read by the DRC checker.  Better would be if the DRC
checker didn't look at slot errors unless directed to.  (i.e. default
is to not look for slot errors; you can override the default with a
config file.)

As an aisde: a useful gEDA tool might be an attribute editor program
(gattrib) which reads in a  schematic, finds all the components, and
then shows them to the user via a spreadsheet interface.   Each
component would occupy a row, and the various attributes would occupy
the columns, like this: 

REFDES	DEVICE		VALUE	FOOTPRINT	MODEL-NAME	FILE
U1 	LM311			so8		LM311		/path/to/spice-model
R1	RESISTOR	100K	0603
C1	CAPACITOR	1uF	0603		
U2	LF356		LF356	so8		

(This will look better if you use a constant spacing sized font.)  Of
course, other attributes would also appear in the following columns.  

Then, you could use gattrib to edit the attributes, and attach new
ones easily.  Right now, you've got to do a lot of clicking to use
gschem to attach attributes to all the parts.  This would be a lot
easier, particularly for larger schematics.

Another way to do this is to create a prog which reads .sch and .sym
files and exports to gnumeric (or even creates whitespace deliminated
.txt).  A similar prog would be used to read the output spreadsheet
format and stick the attribute values back into the .sch and .sym
files.  This would be very easy using Perl or Python.  

Well, this is a project for another day.

> > Therefore, my question is:  where does the define go?  Are you
> > assuming that we run gnetlist in interactive mode?
> >=20
> No, I don't assume that. For this purpose, I added the '-l' flag to
> gnetlist. It loads an scheme file before executing the backend, so you
> can put there the definitions of the DRC matrix, the checks you want to
> pass, and so on. So, IIRC, if you have a file 'definitions.scm', you
> have to execute:
> 	gnetlist -l definitions.scm -g drc2 schematic.sch -o output.drc

OK, I'll try that.  Thank you!

Stuart