On Aug 18, 2011, at 4:05 PM, John Hudak wrote: So, this causes me to ask the question: Why hasen't gattrib been
removed from:[3]http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:gaf ???? as well as any other instances? Perhaps because some of us use it. While the concept is good, the implementation is worthless, and apparently has been 'around' with the same sort of problems since 2006. It's useful for "touch up" of a few attributes, but not for the broad changes you want. The spreadsheet approach really doesn't scale well anyway. If you have 300 bypass capacitors in a project, it's much more efficient to have a "heavy" project-specific bypass capacitor symbol with all of the necessary attributes inside it. Then, to change your bypass capacitor selection, you need only edit that one symbol rather than 300 instances. Unfortunately, gattrib is an orphan: its developer is no longer active on the gEDA project. So, although it remains useful within its limits, nobody is fixing its bugs. Do you wish to volunteer? As a person who is trying to give the gEDA approach a try, frustrations mount daily in trying to make progress. There is no gEDA approach. There are many gEDA approaches. gEDA is a toolkit, not an integrated tool. If you expect it to lead you down some specific usage pathway you will be disappointed. Part of the game is adapting it to the flow your job needs. Its power is that you *can* adapt it to *your* needs: you aren't stuck with an approach that doesn't fit those needs. This brings up another issue that I am curious about....the one of component symbol libraries. My expectation (hope, guess?) was with an effort that is open source, users would contribute their symbols to the library, User-contributed symbols are available at gedasymbols.org. and the symbol library would be huge. I didn't find that reality. I assumed this because users would 'giveback' to the community. Clearly some have done this. I plan on doing this (if I continue down this path). So why hasen't the component mfgs been inclined to develop and contribute symbols? Why hasen't the users contributed more? I think it's partly because symbols are often specialized to a particular project or approach. Perhaps there are not too many users. Perhaps it is a case of: The tools have been built but the users are not comming. Anyway, just curious.... Well, if you go to my area at gedasymbols.org, you'll find symbols for VLSI design and symbolic circuit analysis. Those won't work for pcb. But they're useful for their intended purposes. 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