> Would it make any sense to attempt to use Dia as an alternative gschem?
Sorry to come out of hibernation just to rant. I've used dia many times over the years. It stinks to high heaven. It's user interface is clunky, its rendering is horrible, and its text handling is a disaster. Its been frozen at version 0.99 for years because it remains stuck at a pitiful state of development. Oh, and did I mention that it's hard to use? Gschem is light years ahead of dia. Gschem has been under development for over 10 years and is very easy to use, IMO, once you learn the keystrokes. The recent complaints I have seen on this list about gschem seem to stem from the fact that it is simply a drawing program without knoweldge of electronic concepts like "net", "component" and so on. That is, gschem's basic datastructures are things like "lines", "circles", "text", and so on. In the current architecture, it's up to gnetlist to read the graphical rendition of the circuit, add in the circuit knowledge, and create a netlist. If the desire is to endow gschem with knowdge of circuit concepts, then ISTM that the best way to do it is to add those concepts to gschem itself, preferably through hooks to scheme. Don't derail the project by adopting dia or any other drawing platform. BTW: As long as I'm ranting, let me observe that a good thing to fix before making gschem more flexible is to replace guile with tiny scheme, or some other built-in scheme interpreter. The reason is that the guile dependency is a major source of bugs for gEDA since the guile people are more-or-less hostile to their downstream users. They change the API whenever they want and their dependency tree is bloated with cruft of peripheral use. In my perfect world, gEDA's developers would first get rid of guile, and install some other scheme interpreter directly into libgeda (i.e. don't link to it). Then, the code necessary to handle the circuit concepts would be written up in scheme, and the hooks to invoke the scheme stuff would be written up in the usual C. For speed, some of the more basic structures and operations might also be coded in C -- this is an implementation detail. As an alternative to scheme, some would prefer to see TCL. I have no problem with that, as long as the interpreter is built-in. However, there is a large installed base of scheme, so it's likely we're stuck with it. Thanks for listening, Stuart _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user