On Nov 17, 2009, at 3:17 PM, Dave N6NZ wrote: > I'm curious as to why you found slotting problematic? It's no more or > less obtuse than the rest of gschem.
It's much more troublesome. Every attribute that is given special treatment by libgeda or the gnetlist front end is associated with a rigidity that will cause problems for some flow. One problem is that slotting doesn't play well with SPICE netlisting. Stuart's attempt to fix this a couple of years ago broke slotting in other ways, and was pretty confusing in its own right. Nobody's come up with a good solution. Another problem is that it doesn't play well with hierarchy. Suppose you need a bunch of the same circuit, but one of the building blocks comes in pairs, and another comes in duals. That forces you to draw six of the circuit per block. And then maybe you need nine of them. At that point, hierarchy isn't worth it. But nine identical (from a signal flow point of view) circuits *should* be the kind of thing you do with hierarchy. Construction of slotted symbols is a confusing process, as Stefan and Kai-Martin point out. I agree with Peter that DJ's slotting tricks are an invitation to more chaos and confusion. I'm thinking about a preprocessor for gnetlist that would do hierarchy expansion, parts selection, slot selection and automatic power block insertion, under control of a user-specified BOM and rule set. This would generate an expanded set of concrete "flat" project- oriented schematics from more abstract set of reusable input schematics. But it's a lot of work and I'm very busy right now... 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