> A couple of questions about the gerber exporter: Has the gerber
> export code changed significantly?

Some.  I've been cutting and pasting stuff from the old dev_* files
when I can, but some things just don't fit "as-is".  For example,
thermals were drawn with flashes before, now they're drawn as line
segments.  Why?  Because all the other hids draw them as line
segments.  Same with plane clearances; they used to be drawn as an
annulus, now we clear first then draw the filled circle separately.

I figured at some point in the future we could optimize it to record
the pin locations on the first pass and convert those bits to flashes
on the second pass, but at the moment at least it *works*.

> I know that its in a new file but I was unable to quickly tell if
> the algorithm has changed materially.  For example, are negative
> lines, etc still used?

If you mean negative planes, not at the moment.  It knows about image
polarity, but the logic in the old code didn't actually get used on
any of the test boards I had, so I didn't bother.  You need a really
simplistic board (*no* traces on the planes!) to trigger the
negatives.

I need to deal with an "inverted" flag and make sure all the default
polarities are right, though.  I just added that to the postscript
output yesterday.

> Secondly, I think we need to add a check to see if the gerber export 
> filename exists.  When I type in a bogus filename a segfault occurs.

Good call.

> One last issue.  I was experimenting with adding another exporter to the 
> codebase this evening.  I noticed that the current autogen.sh does not 
> actually regenerate Makefile.in.  After manually running "automake -a" I 
> discovered that I needed to comment out quite a few lines in 
> configure.ac in order to get things to work.

I'm using Fedora Core 3.  If you're using something else, there may be
version skew.  What did you end up deleting?

> On a related note, there are quite a few "deprecated" files in the
> src directory such as dev-gerb* and dev-ps*.  Perhaps these could be
> removed.

Yup.  I take them out when I know I'm done with them, else they hang
around for reference.

Reply via email to