Re: gEDA-user: Functional blocks and PCB format changes

[Andrew Poelstra <asp11@xxxxxx>]

On Sat, Sep 04, 2010 at 06:37:37PM -0400, Rick Collins wrote:
> 
> So are you suggesting that we should, at this time, plan for running
> PCB on a cell phone?  Do you want to design PCB to work on overtaxed
> virtual machines, if so, I expect there will be a lot more important
> things to optimize than the file format which only impacts the
> performance when reading or saving the file.  If we need to work
> with 1000 layer boards, I expect we would have computers which would
> be not at all burdened by XML file formats.
>

I don't see any value in making PCB work on cell phones, but we shouldn't
unnecessarily preclude it. Certainly I don't believe the benefit of XML
would outweigh the costs.

Right now I am working on my laptop, which has no personal data on it;
my entire /home is located on the server in my basement, mounted via
SSHFS. Over a gigabit link this is fine; over wireless, opening large
files is a relatively big deal. On a fast enough link, the CPU load
for the encryption is the bottleneck.

The point is that we can't be sure what the future will bring in terms
of IOPS, storage capacity (even big servers often RAID together dozens
of small drives to get high speeds against low capacity).

Plus, even if individual file bloat is something we can ignore, what
happens when you have thousands or millions of files in source control
or in backups?
 
> I'm trying to be realistic about the requirements.  I think that the
> 2x or 3x factor of file size of using something like XML would be
> lost in the noise.  The advantages of working with an industry
> standard file format could be very large.  Of course as you or
> someone pointed out, IPC-2511B is not a well established format.
> But to my knowledge it is the only one that spans most if not all
> aspects of circuit board manufacturing.  It seems like a great idea
> to work with something this useful and I am pretty sure that
> concerns with using it can be ironed out.
> 

The problem is that there /isn't/ a useful "industry standard format".
If one appears, there is no guarantee that it will be long-lived or
widely-adopted. Better we have a file format that works well for what
we want to do, and use exporters for compatibility.


Andrew



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