On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 12:15 AM, al davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > All I'm suggesting is using a netlist format, and augmenting it > with info relevant to schematic and layout, while keeping it > strictly as a netlist format, so you can do a round trip.
That would be very useful but I don't think a common netlist format is the best tool for this job. Commercial vendors go rather in the direction of a common design database. Whether it will work for them or not - it's another story. These same vendors are well known for locking down customers and competitors. Note that database concept is not about storage (text backend is perfectly fine for most applications) - it's about API. There is a couple of reasons why common API could be better than a common netlist format: - API is (or can be made) abstract, netlist format is not.That's huge benefit for maintenance. It is much easier to add new features at API level than at raw data level. - API usually comes with an implementation. For a file format a user still needs to write functions to traverse data structures etc. Sure, they can be abstracted out (think DOM or SAX), but this effectively is building an ad-hoc API on top of data. - gEDA, thanks to libgeda, is not too far away. It shouldn't be very difficult for gnucap to link to libgeda and read design data directly directly from the "database". Sure, libgeda would have to be extended a bit for this to be possible. - API can cross process boundaries. This makes tighter integration of tools (like selecting probe points for gnucap or backannotating simulated OP results on schematics) possible to implement. On the other hand, common data format wins in network environment - you can send a netlist to someone but you can't send API (unless you send the whole program). For me, a perfect solution would be a common data format (not necessarily a netlist) for exchanging design data and an API/database to work with them. Regards, -r. _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
