Re: gEDA-user: Introduction and some questions/thoughts on gEDA/gaf...

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dan and all,


[snip]
>Breaking of numerous netlisters at once is a concern.  I've actualy been 
>thinking that you'd call some function or set some flag early in the 
>netlister backend to tell gnetlist to enter into hierarchical mode. 
>Hopefully that would not break all the netlisters at once...
>
>It has been a few years since doing a design for an FPGA in verilog, but 
>it was certainly hierarchical.

	Yeah, that is a concern.  Basically all the netlist backends would
have to be updated to be able to output a hierarchical netlist.  Also, I'm
not really convinced that trying to "fix" gnetlist is the right answer.
There is a lot of cruft and rather poor design decisions within that would
I really don't want to continue.  I've been dreaming of writing a brand
new netlister (based heavily on the good pieces of gnetlist), but without
all the warts.  The three things which really need to be implemented are:
hierarchical buses (the most requested feature), hierarchical netlist
output, and the ability to maintain the coupling between netlist and
schematic (to facilitate back annotation and other nifty manipulations).

[snip]
>One of my big complaints about Skill is I wish cadence would have made 
>up their minds about "is it scheme/lisp or isn't it".  It's pretty gross 
>that you can write
>

	There has been some interesting discussions about scripting here
on geda-user, but I'll get to those later.  Right now, I'm once again
considering what to do about guile (in context of a new netlister).  
As much as I like guile, it suffers from three issues (IMHO):

1) It takes over the program.  I like how tcl/tk's interperter is more 
   contained and encapsulated.

2) It isn't particularly portable and is the cause of a lot of porting
   problems.  The maintainers of guile don't seem to care.

3) What is the future of guile?  There hasn't been a release or news in
   1/2 year now from the development group.

	Of course the problem is that gnetlist has a rather large number
of scheme backends which work rather well and I would hate to lose them.
Whatever I end up doing will have to take this into account (read: I will
probably stick with scheme but use a different portable interpreter). 

								-Ales

PS. Please don't respond with your favorite pet scripting language as
    we have had that discussion on geda-* N times already. :-)