gEDA-user: Usability issues of gEDA + PCB

[Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello

Would it be possible to do following changes to improve usability? About
3 people now want to help the Ronja project and explaining them gEDA and
PCB is a pain in the ass. They get stuck on something every couple of
hours when trying to work with gEDA and PCB.

All contributions to Ronja are in Eagle, because people say "sorry, gEDA
is unusable for me".

So Ronja has unofficial RX TMD PCB, unofficial RX SMD PCB, unofficial
TX TMD PCB, unofficial TX SMD PCB, unofficial CPLD Twister, but these
cannot be merged into the development, because the former 4 were
designed in Protel and the latter one in Eagle, because gEDA is pain
in the ass for them to learn and use.

Would it be possible to do the following changes to increase usability?
1) Merge PCB into gEDA so it gets installed all at once. If installing
   PCB is an issue, add --disable-pcb into ./configure
2) Make the install process one ./configure && make && make install if
   possible. Installing gEDA fresh always takes me like 1-2 days because
   it's like 20 libraries where you have to guess the versions correctly
   and if you fail, you have to retry etc.
3) Make a gEDA install guide for trained monkeys, so they don't have to
   spend 2 hours figuring out what combinations of libraries they should
   download, and then it won't work for them anyway, because it's
   PITA to install gtk 2.2 in debian
4) Update the PCB documentation so the format is described correctly
   (one needed to edit solderstrip symbol source but I told him this URL
    describes the internal format, but sorry, it's obsolete and not true
    anymore, there is different number of fields, they are shuffled
    around, and the resolution is now also 100 times higher)
5) Put into PCB library that every time you select a package, it writes
   "put bla_bla into footprint= attribute if you want this package in
    gschem"
6) If 5 is not possible, put a trained monkey algorithm into PCB doc
   which would enable one to translate PCB library entry as seen on
   the library menu into footprint= attribute.
7) Make gEDA and PCB stop complaining 100 error messages every time the
   version changes slightly. It's like Microsoft Word - even two
   neighbour versions are mutually incompatible.

Thanks,

CL<