Re: gEDA-user: outline layer by default [was: outline layer not exported]

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 17:01 -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
> > Wouldn't this be an opportunity to let gsch2pcb check for the
> > default layer stack defined in $HOME/.pcb/preferences or
> > $HOME/.pvb/settings ?It was a bit confusing to me to be able to set
> > the default layers in pcb, but still get the layer stack geda thinks
> > it fits all purposes.
> 
> The direction we want is to have gsch2pcb tell pcb what it wants, and
> let pcb build the board.  I.e. gsch2pcb will create an action script,
> not a complete pcb.

This would suit xgsch2pcb very nicely (as we can throw actions to PCB on
the fly).

There are a few things which need thought through..

We may loose flexibility in specifying custom gsch2pcb search paths, and
whether to use M4 / non M4 libraries. These then become implicit by
PCB's configuration. Will this break many workflows, or do we need
actions to modify PCB's library settings on the fly (perhaps
temporarily, during the run-time of the action script)?

gsch2pcb currently deletes elements in some circumstances. Can we
formalise what those are, and how we tell PCB to do the same?

For example, how will gsch2pcb's action script tell PCB to remove
component "X" without having parsed the PCB file? (And if we did it at
runtime, how do we identify component "X" if its being removed because
it had no refdes etc..?)

I guess we could still let gsch2pcb manually do the deleting part, but
it would be nice to avoid the necessity to modify files on disk and grok
PCB's file-format.

What might work is having a way to enumerate all components on the board
(perhaps select each in turn), and to query enough information about
each to decide delete / don't delete. This requires a far more full
implementation for actions, including return codes (at the least, but
this is desirable anyway), and possibly more complex data-types.

Comments?

Peter C



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