John Doty wrote: > It worries me that people are wiring their scenarios into the tools, > when gEDA's unique strength is its flexibility. This isn't limited to > gEDA: it seems to be a programming universal that people feel > obligated to turn simple, flexible toolkits into bloated, inflexible > "applications". >
I agree with you in principle. But it would be nice for gEDA to work "out of the box" for the most basic cases, so that new users don't have to work very hard to see results. I think it mostly does, except for its error detection abilities, and Kai-Martin is taking a stab at improving that. It won't work for all workflows, but it will help some and future versions will help with more I'm sure. I found gEDA pretty intimidating at first, because it has a bits-and-pieces feel to it. Over time, I'm learning ways to take advantage of all those bits-and-pieces as I find more challenging problems to solve--- and grow less satisfied with bending my workflow to gEDA's "typical" (if you can apply that word to it at all) way of doing things. And I'm finding that the tool is growing with me, which is fabulous. Some of my adaptations, like not tying my symbol library to a particular project, finding a balance bettween "heavy" and "light" symbols that suits my needs, footprint issues, and so on, have been foreseen by others who could have provided a "best practices" set of recommendations for starting me out on the right path. Those recommendations might not have made the first project go any smoother, but definitely would have helped the second, third, and so on. Things like gedasymbols, Luciani's site, etc. fall into this category. Without them to use as references, I would have struggled for much longer than I did. I think the situation is a lot like with the Linux kernel: true, it's powerful code but it takes someone with a big-picture vision to really put that power to good use. And there are different use cases and skill levels, hence all the different distributions that use modified Linux at their cores. LaTeX and pstools are other examples. I'm not suggesting that we need a gEDA "distribution" per se, but I bet there's a way to maintain all the flexibility that gEDA while at the same time improving the out-of-the-box experience. I think that's an important context to view Kai-Martin's work in. b.g. -- Bill Gatliff b...@billgatliff.com _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user