Re: gEDA-user: database driven component chooser - part II

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2007-10-02 at 22:02 -0400, Dan McMahill wrote:
> Peter Clifton wrote:
> 
> > Its "probably" best done as an external gui program which we can
> > communicate with via D-Bus / stdio or some means. This would allow it to
> > suit your database without hard-coding input assumptions in gschem.
> 
> 
> > Alternatively - someone could propose a means for arbitrary guile /
> > external programs to specify a simple UI to gather required parameters.
> > (Like PCB does with its exporters).
> 
> yes, please!  I started on this work a year or more back but got a bit 
> sidetracked.  I'm really happy with how it has worked out for us in PCB. 
>   I have just a few minor additions that I think would make lots of cool 
> stuff possible in gschem.

In theory, we could pull in guile-gnome - and code GTK gui from scheme
code! I'm not sure how well it might work in practise, as I've never
tried!

PRO: Don't re-invent a UI description language -> richer, more purpose
built feeling GUIs.

CON: Code may be more complex - do we want the scheme "addons" to have
to know about GTK?

I wonder if some nice compromise could be found using glade?

> Note that gschem already has some functions to let you do some simple 
> GUI stuff from user scheme code.  The big one thats missing as far as 
> I'm concerned is the attribute[1] editor.  I think that will open the 
> door to full GUI support for various simulators and other backends in a 
> pretty simple way.  i.e. you'd have a scheme file which says that your 
> simulator does these N different types of analysis.  For each of them, 
> here are the options.  Then the attribute editor would take that 
> attribute list and automagically build a set of dialogs for setting 
> everything.

This is one way, which can be powerful - however it does limit the scope
of UI design.

> -Dan
> 
> [1] Someone please help me find a better name.  When I say attribute 
> editor I mean something analogous to the attribute editor dialog that 
> the PCB GUI HID's have and it has nothing to do with gschem attributes.

The explanation was useful - I got lost for a moment thinking "we have
an attribute editor"!

I think its similar to "PPD" for printers, and could be viewed as a
generic object properties UI. (We could get lost again if people start
thinking of component attributes as "properties" though!)

Peter




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