No, that's not what I'm talking about. Footprints depend on the layout tool: gschem is properly agnostic about what layout tool you're using. John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. [1]http://www.noqsi.com/ [2]...@noqsi.com
So that means the shortcoming is with gchs2cpb? We need a better way of stitching two disparate (and intentionally agnostic) tools that newcomers wish to use as if they were an application suite. We need some way for gsch2pcb to stop at each undefined or unmatched footprint, and since we are running gsch2pcb, we know that the origin of the item is a symbol in gschem, so the symbol can be listed, described, tabulated, or displayed, and then a file browsing window, dialog box, command line menu would open up to go searching to find a matching footprint for that symbol, do some basic reality checks on the pin numbers/names/attributes and possibly either allow the user to fix problems in the symbol or footprint and save the modified version in the project directory, or allow the user to keep looking for a better match. This would be easiest if done in a GUI like gschem and pcb, but possible even for a command line only interface. Although matching up pins and pads in two text listings of symbol and footprint attributes would be difficult. By moving the 'repair' process to gsch2pcb, it would allow gschem and pcb to remain completely agnostic of each other, although to me that sounds more like slightly incompatible with each other. On the other hand, I have never used Spice or any other the other second programs (backends?) that gschem is expected to feed. It may be that with that wider perspective I would be able to see clearly why you want gschem and pcb to remain disjoint. On the other hand, if the interface and conversion programs and scripts between all the tools was more complete, intuitive and foolproof, then the entire package of tools could be combined under a single IDE and act like a unified suite of tools, like I expect most of the commercial packages work. Mike References 1. http://www.noqsi.com/ 2. mailto:j...@noqsi.com
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