Re: gEDA-user: Topics discussed at yesterday's Free Dog meeting (10.6.2005)

[James Cotton <peabody124@xxxxxxxxx>]

The project manager can't be that badly broken because I just
recompiled the 8/20/05 version of gaf and have a working project
manager.  I quite like the interface as it's very gtk2
looking.  I'm running gnome 2.12.1 on gentoo, latest of most
things.

If I recall from 6 months ago using it the tools->make pcb function
didn't work as well as gsch2pcb, so I ended up not using it too heavily.

James

*  GEDA project manager.  The current project manager, geda, is broken
and unsupported.  Personally, I think having a working project manager
would be a good thing, particularly becase so many newbies try using
the suite by typing "geda" at the command line.  Right now,
unfortuantely, they are likely to get a segfault when starting geda,
which is a real turn-off.

We discussed whether it was better to fix the existing program
(written in C), or to just write something new from the ground up.
Something new could be written in Python (my suggestion).  This makes
sense because the purpose of the project manager is to present a GUI
to the user, invoke various the various programs used in the design
flow, and keep track of various project files.  This type of
application naturally lends itself to a scripting-type language,
instead of C.  As for scripting languages, Ales threatened to
write the project manager in Scheme.  :-)

However, before doing a rewrite, it would be a good idea to look more
closely at geda to see if it can be easily fixed.  I belive that its
problem is just that it hasn't kept up with changes to the GTK API
(and perhaps a few other issues).