gEDA-user: Updates to gnetlist and spice-sdb

[sdb@cloud9.net (Stuart Brorson)]

Ales & gEDA community,

I understand that you are about to make another relase of gEDA/gaf.  I
hope it is not too late to incorporate some changes into gnetlist and
gnet-spice-sdb.   I have received a couple of patches from people, and
I have also put some new functionality into gnetlist.  Here's what's
new:

*  I have created a mechanism to pass boolian command line flags to
   the Scheme backend.  This is useful for setting switches in the
   Scheme code's behavior.  I use this for a particular purpose
   described below.
   
   I have written a Scheme function called gnetlist:get-calling-flags,
   which returns a list of (option value) pairs.    Valid
   options are:

   verbose_mode
   interactive_mode
   quiet_mode
   sort_mode

   which you can set by using the appropriate command line flags when
   invoking gnetlist.  The values are either #t or #f, depending upon
   which flags are set at the command line.  In the Scheme code, the
   return list will look something like this:

   ((sort_mode #f) (interactive_mode #t) (quiet_mode #t) . . . .)

   Use of this functionality is exemplified in the functions spice-sdb
   and spice-sdb:sort_refdes? which live in gnet-spice-sdb.scm.

*  I have created a command line switch "-s" which causes the output
   of spice-sdb to be sorted depending upon the ascii order of the
   SPICE card's refdes, with one important exception: all cards with
   "A" refdeses are pushed to the end of the netlist.  This is
   apparently important in order to use Gnucap with spice-sdb --
   Gnucap wants to see all the SPICE directive cards at the end of the
   SPICE deck.

   If you don't set the "-s" switch at the command line, the SPICE
   cards are output in the order they are found by gnetlist --
   i.e. some arbitrary order.

*  The idea to incorporate the sort, as well as the Scheme code to
   implement it was sent to me by Ken Healy of UCC in Ireland.  Thank
   you Ken! 
   
*  I incorporated a fix contributed by Theo Deckers which
   cleared up a strange problem he had with '.SUBCKT quoting.  Thank
   you Theo!

*  Finally, I changed the rev date output by spice-sdb to 8.29.2003 so
   that when people send me faulty netlists I can see which version of
   spice-sdb was used to produce them.

I have placed all the new code on my website at:

http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/SPICE/

Note that you need to install several .c patches to get the command
line arg stuff working, as well as the gnet-spice-sdb.scm file.  If
you have any problems, please let me know!  

Stuart