On Aug 12, 2009, at 11:22 AM, DJ Delorie wrote: > >>> Assuming you know how to use chainsaws in general, of course. >> >> Yes, and that last sentence is my point. gEDA is a chainsaw in a >> world of where most only know handsaws. > > I think you're trying too hard to bend my analogy to your needs.
Your analogy? I believe it was mine ;-) And from here it looks like you don't want to consider my point. > I > suspect that, no matter what anyone else says, you'll figure out a way > to say that our users are too stupid to do what we want to make them Not stupid. Stubborn. I don't know why engineering schools teach "you're a specialist and you should fear what you don't understand". As a physicist, I was required to take a class that relentlessly and explicitly taught the opposite. > do, when in reality, they shouldn't *have* to adapt to our way - we > should offer them something that's familiar to them, even if it's just > a starting point, in order to reduce the barriers to them trying gEDA. > > I've spent some time recently with Xilinx's ISE tool. It's to FPGAs > what gEDA is to PCBs. No it's not. gEDA is a general purpose toolkit, one (and only one) of whose applications is feeding your pcb program. ISE is much, much more specialized. > It consists of a number of command line tools > wrapped in a GUI. When I first installed it, I didn't want to figure > out all the command line options for all the tools, I wanted to write > some verilog and put it in a chip. I wanted *results* and I wanted > them *fast*. The GUI helped me do that. Later on, I figured out the > command line tools so I could put them in a Makefile, but I never > would have gotten to that point if I hadn't had the GUI to help me get > started. I have no objection to wrappers. What I object to is the constant demand to fix perceived problems by violating the fairly clean, modular nature of the kit. Rather, we need to make things *more* modular (e.g. get the hardwired behavior out of the gnetlist front end). > > gEDA needs to be like that. It needs to - at least at first - offer > an easy and OBVIOUS workflow for the common users' needs. The > learning curve for doing basic stuff should be small. If the user > sticks to it, more options are available later. Let them learn all > those things as they're needed, not force them to learn it all up > front. > >> They expect it to work like a hand tool. > > As a woodworker, I find this analogy inappropriate - hand tools > require *much* more care and tuning than, say, power tools. So run the analogy the other way if you wish. Someone who attempts to use a hand tool as if it is a power tool will be frustrated, but turning it into a power tool is not the answer. John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. http://www.noqsi.com/ j...@noqsi.com _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user