On Monday 21 January 2008, a r wrote: > Good place for gEDA to start spreading in this industry is to > concentrate on design entry tools (schematics editor, > netlisters), logic simulators and data viewers (simulation > results etc). This is because these tools are relatively > simple, non-critical, easy to adopt
It looks like that is what we have, for that reason. Also, they make nice student projects. A contrary point .. we need the advanced projects to appeal to advanced developers. The experts don't want to go back to doing maintenance on the programs of the past, even their own. They don't want to join a project they think is being led by someone who knows less than they do. But keep in mind another mission, and measure of success ... How much of a design can you do with a totally free system? This can change the priority of some .. For example "data viewers" .. are useful only if you have data to view. The most important data viewers are to view the data from other free tools, that depend only on other free tools. Likewise with "netlisters". The most important netlisters are the ones for free tools, especially "ours", which should be 100% supported. It is most important to support "our" tools. Then next, "other free" tools. The way I differentiate "our" tools from "other free" tools is that it goes both ways. By "our" tools, I mean the key developers are here, and they participate in gEDA, and we all work together to make them work as a system. By "other free" tools, I mean those that could be here but are not, and that supporting it would be a one-way street because they don't participate in gEDA. Notice I said "key developers". There are lots of cases where there is overlap in the user communities, but not the developers. A very important need here is for the "glue" support to be developed as features are being developed, so it is ready when the features are ready. As an example, "spectre" and "verilog-AMS" have not been important because they have not been used by other free tools, only commercial ones. Both of these have become a priority because gnucap can use them. We have a situation now where our netlisters do not fully support our own tools. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user