On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 13:50 +0100, Markus Hitter wrote: > As you mentioned one of the differences is the inspection of changes, > but there's another one. Track positions are more like the > programmer's object data, than like source code. So they can change > often, and often without the intent to change functionality of the > layout.
What about extracting the _topology_ of the tracks (probably using / refactoring some code from the topological auto-router). It should not be too hard to produce a "same / different" output from comparing to topologies, without caring about he minutiae of every coordinate along the way. Producing a useful "diff" view would be harder of course. > One solution would be to not store track positions at all, but always > generate them with an autorouter on the fly. As long as autorouters > aren't as full-featured as compilers in the software world, this > isn't an option, though. Future music :-) This is an interesting idea. Auto-routing to match a particular topology would be feasible, even if a full auto-route from scratch would not be. The topological auto-router can do this. The hard part of auto-routing is generating an efficient topology to use. > > there's never a version where the changelog says "Deleted 20 unused > > features. Patched 300 memory leaks. No new features added". > > Sure there are. Actually, they're my favourite ;-) For my money, it sounds like there should have been at least 21 commits there, if not 320. ;) Still - PCB designs are more like deployed web-software.. very linear in their development, and diverging branches don't make a lot of sense. PCBs are of course harder, as it becomes harder to partition and segregate areas of conflict so individual changes could be reverted. -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!) Tel: +44 (0)1223 748328 - (Shared lab phone, ask for me) _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user