Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, 2010-12-19 at 22:28 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: I am trying to file a bug at launchpad.net. We've not moved yet.. so it would be best if you didn't add any bugs to launchpad.net. The PCB bug tracker is still at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=73743atid=538811 There is a patch on tracker(ID 2986641). It add few new layers and one of them is component_mask(and solder_mask). What do you think about that patch? It doesn't apply currently, but it can be a starting point. I've not had a chance to look at it yet, but will probably do so after we get moving bug trackers sorted. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 11:59:10AM +, Peter Clifton wrote: On Sun, 2010-12-19 at 22:28 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: I am trying to file a bug at launchpad.net. We've not moved yet.. so it would be best if you didn't add any bugs to launchpad.net. The PCB bug tracker is still at: Ok. I will wait a bit. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=73743atid=538811 There is a patch on tracker(ID 2986641). It add few new layers and one of them is component_mask(and solder_mask). What do you think about that patch? It doesn't apply currently, but it can be a starting point. I've not had a chance to look at it yet, but will probably do so after we get moving bug trackers sorted. Take your time. I still have a lot of other thinks to do. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 01:02:25AM +, Peter Clifton wrote: On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 22:57 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: Sometimes, when you place to lines too close, but not that close in polygon. It will make thin line in the polygon connecting two part of the polygon. DRC will mark this line as too thin. Actually, I'm pretty sure the DRC will miss this error (unless the thin line was _required_ for some connectivity), - And even then I'm not 100% sure. It misses the error. I have found old bug describing this behaviour. It should automaticly erase such lines. Any proposal, how to fix this? It is quite a hard problem to solve actually.. I'll have a think about it... it really needs solving, and I've been looking at / thinking about polygons recently. You are probably the most qualified one :-). When you make a via in polygon. Change the clerance to too small value and add thermal(even full thermal). DRC will mark this via as having too smal clearance. This seems like bug to me. Sounds like ;) (I'll point you at a bug tracker to file it at some point, but we're probably going to move trackers pretty soon anyway, so you might have the honour of filing the first (new) bug in the new bug tracker if you wait a while!). I am trying to file a bug at launchpad.net. Bigger issues is that when I drag component, lines are dragged with it. This is fine, but the lines do not respect any orthogonal/45 deg rules. You can switch off rubber-band mode in the settings menu. More intelligent rubber-banding could be done in the future, but is not trivial to implement. I know that this is problematic. I can work with current state. I just pointed to all problems I had :-). I cannot simply unmask part of the board. I know how to do it, but that is not optimal. Having some Solder mask layer with polygons clearing solder mask would be neat. Future TODO item for when we re-work layer support in (some) future PCB version. I'd expect it will not happen any time soon. There is a patch on tracker(ID 2986641). It add few new layers and one of them is component_mask(and solder_mask). What do you think about that patch? It doesn't apply currently, but it can be a starting point. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 14:45:47 +1100 Stephen Ecob silicon.on.inspirat...@gmail.com wrote: Boiling it down greatly, Clif and Kaimartin are both asking for more attention from the maintainers. Has the gEDA community given thought to the possibility of paid maintainers ? I'm a relative newbie, please let me know if this has already been thrashed through. If it is worth discussing, I guess the big questions are: 1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? 2. Could we raise enough money to make this viable ? Why don't we put banners to our webpage: We need developers! We need contributors! or something like that. There might be some out there, who would spend more time on the project. I've seen this on other FOSS pages. Just an idea. -- Levente Kovacs http://levente.logonex.eu ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Why dont you take headpics of DJDelorie and make a banner, Please read: An urgent appeal from PCB maintainer DJ Delorie... :D On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 10:40 PM, Levente Kovacs leventel...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 14:45:47 +1100 Stephen Ecob silicon.on.inspirat...@gmail.com wrote: Boiling it down greatly, Clif and Kaimartin are both asking for more attention from the maintainers. Has the gEDA community given thought to the possibility of paid maintainers ? I'm a relative newbie, please let me know if this has already been thrashed through. If it is worth discussing, I guess the big questions are: 1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? 2. Could we raise enough money to make this viable ? Why don't we put banners to our webpage: We need developers! We need contributors! or something like that. There might be some out there, who would spend more time on the project. I've seen this on other FOSS pages. Just an idea. -- Levente Kovacs http://levente.logonex.eu ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Bob Paddock wrote:
If you switch to gEDA, will you want a native windows build? Help with that
from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list.
I've been poking at 'the perfect windows version' for some time, will
give up on that for now.
I think I just make basic canvas and figure how to to get the basic
HID stuff going.
Is there any step by step guide to get a new HID up and running
(besides trolling the list here for the last few years with grep)?
One thing I don't recall be doing before is that I want to use
wxWindows, so it would have its
own main() loop. Whats the best way to deal with that?
Did you try to build/test all the demos that come with wxWindows - did
you try to
build another app, that uses it? - please report. My personal impression
when I
went for a widget tool kit was, that it's very complicated and broken.
My best advice is, to avoid wxWindows altogether and use FLTK instead.
It may be C++ but the nasty stuff is left out - it's more better C, so
I find it very easy and convenient.
With FLTK this problem looks like
main()
{
// define all GUI stuff here
exitCode = Fl::run();
// release and clean stuff
return exitCode;
}
If you want to replace Fl::run() with an augmented event loop:
copy this from Fl.cxx
...
#define FOREVER 1e20
/**
As long as any windows are displayed this calls Fl::wait()
repeatedly. When all the windows are closed it returns zero
(supposedly it would return non-zero on any errors, but FLTK calls
exit directly for these). A normal program will end main()
with return Fl::run();.
*/
int Fl::run() {
while (Fl_X::first) wait(FOREVER);
return 0;
}
...
and modify to your liking. It's not necessary btw. to do that for new
threads,
idle processing or adding your own check-callbacks.
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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On 12.12.2010 17:36, Martin Kupec wrote: I am personally not that strong on windows. But getting it up on windows will probably help. Do you have an idea, how to build it on windows? I expect errors and problems, but just generally which toolchain to use? pcb can be compiled with mingw-cross (http://mingw-cross-env.nongnu.org/). It's usable but lacks some features you have to disable at compile time and run slow on win32. Frank. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Did you try to build/test all the demos that come with wxWindows - did you try to build another app, that uses it? - please report. My personal impression when I went for a widget tool kit was, that it's very complicated and broken. I've been using wxWidgets for over ten years now. You'll even find my name in the wxBook http://www.phptr.com/content/images/0131473816/downloads/0131473816_book.pdf so I'm well familiar with its warts. All of the commercial apps I've had to develop at work have been based on wx. Can't argue with it being complicated. Start with the above book, and get the 'minimal' sample to build/run then go from there. Can't argue that it could be improved in many places, but what can't stand improvement? What part did you find that was broken, and what version where you using? My best advice is, to avoid wxWindows altogether and use FLTK instead. Is it cross platform for Windows, Unix like, and MACs? I've used some applications based on FLTK but never developed any. #define FOREVER 1e20 Code full of 'magic numbers' with no comments don't give me the warm fuzzies. It should also have parenthesise around the number, if this is truly C and not something special to FLTK. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Bob Paddock wrote: so I'm well familiar with its warts. All of the commercial apps I've had to develop at work have been based on wx. Then you are in a special situation and I won't argue with you about usability. Can't argue with it being complicated. Start with the above book, and get the 'minimal' sample to build/run then go from there. Can't argue that it could be improved in many places, but what can't stand improvement? What part did you find that was broken, and what version where you using? As this was 2006, probably a very old version. If I remember correct, the minimal sample (using OpenGL?) either didn't compile or segfaulted or just didn't do anything on Windows or Linux (I have no Mac). Is it cross platform for Windows, Unix like, and MACs? I've used some applications based on FLTK but never developed any. Yes - I wouldn't recommend it otherwise. #define FOREVER 1e20 Code full of 'magic numbers' with no comments don't give me the warm fuzzies. It should also have parenthesise around the number, if this is truly C and not something special to FLTK. Parentheses around a constant are nonsense - there is nothing a plain number could evaluate to in the preprocessor than itself (unless you #define 1e20 (foo * i++)), so it has the highest precedence by itself. (couldn't you even #define (1e20) foo*i++ ?;-) I personally found, that the comment just below the definition is totally satisfactory. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Parentheses around a constant are nonsense - there is nothing a plain number could evaluate to in the preprocessor than itself (unless you #define 1e20 (foo * i++)), so it has the highest precedence by itself. (couldn't you even #define (1e20) foo*i++ ?;-) Not knowing how the #define could be used in all cases it is better to put parentheses around such usages to have the compiler generate an error, rather than silently give the wrong value in corner cases where operators like multiplication and division are passed as parameters to an other macro. http://gimpel-online.com/MsgRef.html Look up #665. MISRA2004 19.4 and 19.10 apply in some circumstances as well. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Bob Paddock wrote:
Parentheses around a constant are nonsense - there is nothing a plain number
could evaluate to in the preprocessor than itself (unless you #define 1e20 (foo *
i++)),
so it has the highest precedence by itself. (couldn't you even #define (1e20)
foo*i++ ?;-)
Not knowing how the #define could be used in all cases it is better to
put parentheses around such usages to have the compiler generate an
error, rather than silently give the wrong value in corner cases where
operators like multiplication and division are passed as parameters to
an other macro.
http://gimpel-online.com/MsgRef.html Look up #665.
MISRA2004 19.4 and 19.10 apply in some circumstances as well.
This reference says the same, as I would have answered without reading
it now:
It is sensible, to put parentheses around parameters in a macro
definition like
#define MY_MULT(a, b) do {(a) * (b)} while (0)
because someone could call it like MY_MULT(x+y, u+v), that would evaluate
to x + y*u +v otherwise. But a constant definition like
#define FOREVER 1e20
doesn't have any macro parameters. Therefore defining it like
#define FOREVER (1e20)
is pointless. The parentheses just get ignored by the compiler, so they
don't hurt either. They just show that the programmer doesn't know
in this case, why he is doing what. Not to be confused with
#define FOO_BIT 0x0001
#define BAR_BIT (FOO_BIT 1)
#define BUZ_BIT (BAR_BIT 1)
where a computation is involved, that could get broken by context.
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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 04:05:11PM +, Peter Clifton wrote: Well, don't forget to raise the issues here - you might find you get some of them fixed for free ;) Fixing issues affecting everyone benefits everyone. If they are very complex to fix, sponsoring someone with the required know-how to fix them might speed up the process of course. It took me a little longer, but I have bunch of issues I need to address. For larger desings it is needed to automaticly(pseudo-automaticly) connect pins/vias/pads with polygon they lay in if there is rat to that polygon(or something else the polygon intersect with). Good example is polygon connected to GND. This one will probably need assingment of net to polygons. I want to write a little work-around. Iam writting action for selecting net by name. Should work like clicking on net name in netlist window and then button select. I think that such action will be usefull in general. Sometimes, when you place to lines too close, but not that close in polygon. It will make thin line in the polygon connecting two part of the polygon. DRC will mark this line as too thin. It should automaticly erase such lines. Any proposal, how to fix this? When you make a via in polygon. Change the clerance to too small value and add thermal(even full thermal). DRC will mark this via as having too smal clearance. This seems like bug to me. Bigger issues is that when I drag component, lines are dragged with it. This is fine, but the lines do not respect any orthogonal/45 deg rules. I cannot simply unmask part of the board. I know how to do it, but that is not optimal. Having some Solder mask layer with polygons clearing solder mask would be neat. And one question. Is it possible to enable snapping to end of lines? I know about snapping to pins/pads/vias, but have not found how to snap to end of line. This list is just what we came into when trying PCB. I am definetly not blaming anyone for any of those issuses. Just letting you know what are my problems. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 22:57 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: Sometimes, when you place to lines too close, but not that close in polygon. It will make thin line in the polygon connecting two part of the polygon. DRC will mark this line as too thin. Actually, I'm pretty sure the DRC will miss this error (unless the thin line was _required_ for some connectivity), - And even then I'm not 100% sure. It should automaticly erase such lines. Any proposal, how to fix this? It is quite a hard problem to solve actually.. I'll have a think about it... it really needs solving, and I've been looking at / thinking about polygons recently. When you make a via in polygon. Change the clerance to too small value and add thermal(even full thermal). DRC will mark this via as having too smal clearance. This seems like bug to me. Sounds like ;) (I'll point you at a bug tracker to file it at some point, but we're probably going to move trackers pretty soon anyway, so you might have the honour of filing the first (new) bug in the new bug tracker if you wait a while!). Bigger issues is that when I drag component, lines are dragged with it. This is fine, but the lines do not respect any orthogonal/45 deg rules. You can switch off rubber-band mode in the settings menu. More intelligent rubber-banding could be done in the future, but is not trivial to implement. I cannot simply unmask part of the board. I know how to do it, but that is not optimal. Having some Solder mask layer with polygons clearing solder mask would be neat. Future TODO item for when we re-work layer support in (some) future PCB version. I'd expect it will not happen any time soon. And one question. Is it possible to enable snapping to end of lines? I know about snapping to pins/pads/vias, but have not found how to snap to end of line. Hmm, not sure. I thought it worked, but then I've been using my PCB+GL branch for _ages_, and I fixed up the snapping code there to be more usable. This list is just what we came into when trying PCB. I am definetly not blaming anyone for any of those issuses. Just letting you know what are my problems. Thanks for the list. PS. did I point you at my PCB+GL branch yet? git://repo.or.cz/geda-pcb/pcjc2.git (pcb+gl branch), OR pcb+gl_experimental. For me, my biggest bugbear with stock PCB was the lack of layer translucency, and slow rendering.. so I did this: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/pcb+gl_3d/pcb+gl_3d-6.png http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/pcb+gl_3d/pcb+gl_3d-2.png Best wishes, -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
If you switch to gEDA, will you want a native windows build? Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. I've been poking at 'the perfect windows version' for some time, will give up on that for now. I think I just make basic canvas and figure how to to get the basic HID stuff going. Is there any step by step guide to get a new HID up and running (besides trolling the list here for the last few years with grep)? One thing I don't recall be doing before is that I want to use wxWindows, so it would have its own main() loop. Whats the best way to deal with that? And getting installer up and running is probably another story. Dan put together a NSIS based installer based on some of my work, it has been part of the PCB distribution for years. Only thing it really lacks is an icon. Not sure it has been updated to the latest version if NSIS but that should not be hard. See the win32 subdirectory. Unless I missed the change, direct printing under windows does not work, and the library manager is broken under Windows due to the way paths are handled. Exporting to PostScript works now when using GhostView under Windows to print that way. -- http://blog.softwaresafety.net/ http://www.designer-iii.com/ http://www.wearablesmartsensors.com/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Is there any step by step guide to get a new HID up and running 1. Copy the nohid hid. Hard-code a drawing surface and zoom values, work on getting the pcb drawn correctly *at all*. 2. add in code for zooming, scrolling, flipping, etc. 3. Add in menus and shortcuts. 4. Add in all the other dialogs (attributes, netlist, pinout, etc) 5. ... 6. Profit! ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
It won't be perfect until its compilable by VStudio IDE and debuggable inside it as such. As long as GCC is involved in any equation of building software for Windows, no developer (who is actually paid to develop Windows software) is going to even touch it. I look forward to trying your LLVM port, when will be be ready? http://llvm.org/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On 12/11/2010 12:01 PM, Martin Kupec wrote: We actually use Windows XP desktops..but for gEDA we have VirtualBox with linux installed. But this will probably change later on as we finish our switchover. Our previous EDA was formica.cz and it has only windows version. If you switch to gEDA, will you want a native windows build? Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. It would help a lot with getting more users/developers. JG ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 10:29:51AM -0600, John Griessen wrote: On 12/11/2010 12:01 PM, Martin Kupec wrote: We actually use Windows XP desktops..but for gEDA we have VirtualBox with linux installed. But this will probably change later on as we finish our switchover. Our previous EDA was formica.cz and it has only windows version. If you switch to gEDA, will you want a native windows build? Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. It would help a lot with getting more users/developers. I am personally not that strong on windows. But getting it up on windows will probably help. Do you have an idea, how to build it on windows? I expect errors and problems, but just generally which toolchain to use? And getting installer up and running is probably another story. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Dec 12, 2010, at 9:29 AM, John Griessen wrote: Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. It would help a lot with getting more users/developers. My customers in Japan report success using Peter C's Windows build: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda-windows.html 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 09:45:29AM -0700, John Doty wrote: On Dec 12, 2010, at 9:29 AM, John Griessen wrote: Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. It would help a lot with getting more users/developers. My customers in Japan report success using Peter C's Windows build: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda-windows.html This seems like it is near to working state. It would probably really help, if we fix some issues, probably release current version and put it on the main page to download section(with some neat warning). I am interested in the build process? Peter, how have you build this? Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, 2010-12-12 at 17:36 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 10:29:51AM -0600, John Griessen wrote: If you switch to gEDA, will you want a native windows build? Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. It would help a lot with getting more users/developers. I am personally not that strong on windows. But getting it up on windows will probably help. Do you have an idea, how to build it on windows? I expect errors and problems, but just generally which toolchain to use? I've used Cesar Strauss' minipack tools to build it before. This isn't particularly maintained, but the latest gEDA version is packaged up here for testing: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda-windows.html -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, 2010-12-12 at 17:56 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 09:45:29AM -0700, John Doty wrote: On Dec 12, 2010, at 9:29 AM, John Griessen wrote: Help with that from anyone who is up on windows is on the wanted list. It would help a lot with getting more users/developers. My customers in Japan report success using Peter C's Windows build: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda-windows.html This seems like it is near to working state. It would probably really help, if we fix some issues, probably release current version and put it on the main page to download section(with some neat warning). I am interested in the build process? Peter, how have you build this? mingw32 + Cesar Strauss's minipack build system. (Which comes with recipes for gEDA) git://repo.or.cz/minipack.git -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 05:05:46PM +, Peter Clifton wrote: On Sun, 2010-12-12 at 17:56 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: I am interested in the build process? Peter, how have you build this? mingw32 + Cesar Strauss's minipack build system. (Which comes with recipes for gEDA) git://repo.or.cz/minipack.git Thanks. I will look at it and see if I can get it up and running. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On 12/12/2010 15:14, Martin Kupec wrote: On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 05:05:46PM +, Peter Clifton wrote: On Sun, 2010-12-12 at 17:56 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: I am interested in the build process? Peter, how have you build this? mingw32 + Cesar Strauss's minipack build system. (Which comes with recipes for gEDA) git://repo.or.cz/minipack.git Thanks. I will look at it and see if I can get it up and running. Getting started with minipack http://code.google.com/p/minipack/wiki/GettingStarted Support mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/minipack Let me know if you have any trouble using it. Regards, Cesar ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 09:55:37PM +1100, Stephen Ecob wrote: I'm *very* unsure of is whether we could raise enough to make a difference. Does anyone have any idea of how many of us make commercial use of gEDA ? Hi, I am completly new in gEDA(like few days). I am indend to use gEDA for commercial use. I work for a commpany developing PCBs and we are about to switch from our current PCB developement suite and use gEDA instead. I personaly like gEDAs designa a lot, but some of my colleague feel a bit different way. We are still in a phase of testing this software. As some of you probably noticed, I started a fork of PCB. As there are some issues which have to be solved before we can really start using this software. I intend to keep a fork with nesesary changes and push the changes upstream later. This way it doesn't bother me much, that pushing upstream is a bit problematic as I have just read. But to the point in this discussion. When we start to use this EDA software fully in our bussines, we will come to some shortcoming of this software and we intend to fix them or pay for having them fixed. But this will happend not before few months from now. I hope I have not offended anyone by starting a fork. I intend to push everything to upstream as soon as possible. Actually there are still no my patches, they will probably appear in few days as I come to bugs. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 10:53 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: As some of you probably noticed, I started a fork of PCB. Nope.. but since you thought we might notice.. I presume it is a git branch somewhere... repo.or.cz or github? As there are some issues which have to be solved before we can really start using this software. I intend to keep a fork with nesesary changes and push the changes upstream later. This way it doesn't bother me much, that pushing upstream is a bit problematic as I have just read. Well, don't forget to raise the issues here - you might find you get some of them fixed for free ;) Fixing issues affecting everyone benefits everyone. If they are very complex to fix, sponsoring someone with the required know-how to fix them might speed up the process of course. Which bits of gEDA are you using? gschem, PCB, xgsch2pcb? I presume on a Linux desktop. Anyway, if you have problems let us (or me) know, I'm always keen to hear of success stories with gEDA / PCB being used commercially, so I hope I can help make that happen. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Dec 11, 2010, at 9:05 AM, Peter Clifton wrote: I'm always keen to hear of success stories with gEDA / PCB being used commercially, OK, I don't mind bragging ;-) The CCD driver board for the ASTRO-H mission (http://astro-h.isas.jaxa.jp/index.html.en) is headed to layout and fab of the engineering model. The layout contractor is using PADS, which gEDA can of course export the design to, but I didn't find out what they planned to use until very late. gEDA made accommodating this late decision trivially easy. This kind of flexibility is a huge advantage for gEDA. The design is online at https://github.com/noqsi/SXI. And we just won a NASA SBIR competition. See http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/abstracts/10/sbir/phase1/SBIR-10-1-S3.06-9833.html?solicitationId=SBIR_10_P1 Here, we used gEDA for the design of breadboard electronics, and we plan to use gEDA and PCB for the prototype electronics. We'll put this up on github too. So, a big thank-you to the developers, and to the contributors to gedasymbols. You'll see a donation when the NASA money comes in. 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
As some of you probably noticed, I started a fork of PCB. One of many :-) The GPL explicitly allows such forks, so don't worry about it. Please try to get your changes merged upstream though, so (1) we all benefit from each other's work, and (2) your fork doesn't diverge too far. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 04:05:11PM +, Peter Clifton wrote: On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 10:53 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: As some of you probably noticed, I started a fork of PCB. Nope.. but since you thought we might notice.. I presume it is a git branch somewhere... repo.or.cz or github? Since I am czech, the repo.or.cz was clear choice :-). As there are some issues which have to be solved before we can really start using this software. I intend to keep a fork with nesesary changes and push the changes upstream later. This way it doesn't bother me much, that pushing upstream is a bit problematic as I have just read. Well, don't forget to raise the issues here - you might find you get some of them fixed for free ;) Fixing issues affecting everyone benefits everyone. If they are very complex to fix, sponsoring someone with the required know-how to fix them might speed up the process of course. Now there are few minor issues, some of them are already fixed in your branch. I will try to post another email describing them later today. Which bits of gEDA are you using? gschem, PCB, xgsch2pcb? We want to use gschem, gsch2pcb and PCB. I have to look to xgsch2pcb. I missed that one. Haven't you seen ebuild for xgsch2pcb somewhere around? I presume on a Linux desktop. Anyway, if you have problems let us (or me) know, I'm always keen to hear of success stories with gEDA / PCB being used commercially, so I hope I can help make that happen. We actually use Windows XP desktops..but for gEDA we have VirtualBox with linux installed. But this will probably change later on as we finish our switchover. Our previous EDA was formica.cz and it has only windows version. If we really start using it in general, you will definetly know as I will be talking here regullary :-). Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:48:57PM -0500, DJ Delorie wrote: As some of you probably noticed, I started a fork of PCB. One of many :-) The GPL explicitly allows such forks, so don't worry about it. Please try to get your changes merged upstream though, so (1) we all benefit from each other's work, and (2) your fork doesn't diverge too far. I will do my best to do that. Because of both reasons. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 19:01 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: We actually use Windows XP desktops. Have you ever tried KiCAD? That is available native for Microsoft Windows. I would be interested how it compares -- and I think I will never find the time and motivation to serious test it. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 07:13:14PM +0100, Stefan Salewski wrote: On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 19:01 +0100, Martin Kupec wrote: We actually use Windows XP desktops. Have you ever tried KiCAD? That is available native for Microsoft Windows. I would be interested how it compares -- and I think I will never find the time and motivation to serious test it. I just gave about an hour to KiCAD. From my point of view it is different. It is one rather monolitic piece of software. The gEDA is a lot of smaller tools. Personaly I like the second approach. The good thing about the pcb editor is that polygons belongs to an net. So it automaticly connect to the same net and avoids all the other nets. There is really a lot of differences, some bigger some smaller. But from my point of view it is very simillar. And I have no idea which one is better. Martin Kupec ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Peter Clifton wrote: Not a bad thing IMO.. and the toporouter not only looks like it will be able to do excellent routing, its quality output will attract users to the software. That in turn helps attract development effort (or funding for it). Sure, a fully functional topo router would be a great step forward. It would make geda/pcb stand out from the competition. However, if the goal is to attract users, there is a more powerful means: An installer of native windows versions that works with no caveats. ---)kaimartin(--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53 ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
However, if the goal is to attract users, there is a more powerful means: An installer of native windows versions that works with no caveats. Also a PCB frontpage with some screenshots. Appearence matters! ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
However, if the goal is to attract users, there is a more powerful means: An installer of native windows versions that works with no caveats. I am *always* willing to accept patches to improve gEDA compilation and performance on Windows. However, I would need (modest) sponsorship to do the work *myself*, not only because I do not have a modern copy of Windows, but also because it would take a significant amount of relatively unproductive time to get up-to-date on the idiosyncrasies of Windows development (I think I last compiled a Windows program in about 2004). Cheers, Peter -- Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk Remote Sensing Research Group Surrey Space Centre ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? In my case: yes. :-/ Peter -- Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk Remote Sensing Research Group Surrey Space Centre ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk wrote: 1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? In my case: yes. :-/ Peter OK, so that's a 'yes' for question 1! Now for question 2 - money. A few weeks back I was seriously considering paying $5K for Altium. In the end I decided against it (closed source p*sses me off too much), but it did make me realise that I could justify spending that kind of money on pcb software. Now if we're thinking in terms of a $200K per year developer then $5K will achieve next to nothing - but let's think of alternatives. I can't remember the details, but I vaguely recall that a second Google Summer of code with funding of ~$15K would have allowed Anthony to finish the toporouter. http://www.linuxfund.org/projects/pcb/ tells me that $3330 allowed DJ to improve PCB's file import system. So we don't necessarily have to think in $100K's for achieving real results. Now many of us aren't in a position to spend money on PCB software - but what if two other members of our community were also able to afford $5K ? Perhaps three of us could chip in to fund a GSOC equivalent. If that allowed a result like finishing the toporouter (say), I could well judge that to be money well spent. If 7 other people came forward and it was $2K each I'd find it a no brainer. But I realise I'm really ignorant of my own community - am I the only one who would consider funding PCB development by others ? Are there 7 who could afford $2K ? Are there 20 who could afford $750 ? ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Stephen Ecob silicon.on.inspirat...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk wrote: 1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? In my case: yes. :-/ Peter OK, so that's a 'yes' for question 1! Now for question 2 - money. A few weeks back I was seriously considering paying $5K for Altium. In the end I decided against it (closed source p*sses me off too much), but it did make me realise that I could justify spending that kind of money on pcb software. Now if we're thinking in terms of a $200K per year developer then $5K will achieve next to nothing - but let's think of alternatives. I can't remember the details, but I vaguely recall that a second Google Summer of code with funding of ~$15K would have allowed Anthony to finish the toporouter. http://www.linuxfund.org/projects/pcb/ tells me that $3330 allowed DJ to improve PCB's file import system. So we don't necessarily have to think in $100K's for achieving real results. Now many of us aren't in a position to spend money on PCB software - but what if two other members of our community were also able to afford $5K ? Perhaps three of us could chip in to fund a GSOC equivalent. If that allowed a result like finishing the toporouter (say), I could well judge that to be money well spent. If 7 other people came forward and it was $2K each I'd find it a no brainer. But I realise I'm really ignorant of my own community - am I the only one who would consider funding PCB development by others ? Are there 7 who could afford $2K ? Are there 20 who could afford $750 ? I'm aiming to finish University in a few months.. if people would like to fund work on the toporouter, then I would be pretty keen to work on it full time. Regards, Anthony ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
DJ Delorie d...@delorie.com writes: If you want to become a PCB committer, the process starts by writing good patches, reviewing other people's patches, and being involved in design discussions. When it gets to the point where the maintainers are just checking in whatever you ask, you're in :-) Well, obviously, this path was tried, but requires too much patience to be successful. And then there is that closed gEDA-dev list. How can the above work when the dev list is closed? -- Stephan ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Anthony Blake wrote: Stephen Ecob wrote: 1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? I'm aiming to finish University in a few months.. if people would like to fund work on the toporouter, then I would be pretty keen to work on it full time. Not wanting to put too much of a spanner in the works... It would need to be thought out carefully - for example, I'm pretty sure that in the UK, the sorts of sums of money that are being talked about mean that HMRC would be interested for income tax / national insurance purposes. Whilst I'm not saying it couldn't be done, the overheads of going self-employed (which is what this is) for a short period might mean that the $15k (or whatever) ends up being significantly less in the hands of the developer. Of course, for a developer that's already self-employed... ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
I'm aiming to finish University in a few months.. if people would like to fund work on the toporouter, then I would be pretty keen to work on it full time. Regards, Anthony Good, we've established that money could help to improve gEDA :) What I'm *very* unsure of is whether we could raise enough to make a difference. Does anyone have any idea of how many of us make commercial use of gEDA ? As a business user I face the fact that if I choose to use commercial EDA software such as Altium then I'll pay $4K every year for a program that will make me go prematurely bald as I pull my hair out in frustration at bugs that I have no power to fix. I've chosen to use free software instead. Yes, PCB has many shortcomings - but I'm free to fix them. My business is just starting up, so cashflow is tight. At this stage I'm more inclined to contribute to gEDA by coding myself than by paying others to do it for me - but in the future I may have less time and more money. At that stage paying others to improve gEDA would make good business sense. I could easily justify $4K per year, perhaps more - businesses who use Cadence or Zuken are probably paying $20K per year. One business contributing $4K per year is almost insignificant - but 10 could achieve something worthwhile, 50 could fund a full time developer. But it's nothing more than a pipe dream unless there are others out there who think the same. Does anyone else think the same ? ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 21:55:37 +1100 Stephen Ecob silicon.on.inspirat...@gmail.com wrote: Good, we've established that money could help to improve gEDA :) What I'm *very* unsure of is whether we could raise enough to make a difference. Does anyone have any idea of how many of us make commercial use of gEDA ? As a business user I face the fact that if I choose to use commercial EDA software such as Altium then I'll pay $4K every year for a program that will make me go prematurely bald as I pull my hair out in frustration at bugs that I have no power to fix. I've chosen to use free software instead. Yes, PCB has many shortcomings - but I'm free to fix them. My business is just starting up, so cashflow is tight. At this stage I'm more inclined to contribute to gEDA by coding myself than by paying others to do it for me - but in the future I may have less time and more money. At that stage paying others to improve gEDA would make good business sense. I could easily justify $4K per year, perhaps more - businesses who use Cadence or Zuken are probably paying $20K per year. One business contributing $4K per year is almost insignificant - but 10 could achieve something worthwhile, 50 could fund a full time developer. But it's nothing more than a pipe dream unless there are others out there who think the same. Does anyone else think the same ? I've decided that when I make money with gEDA, I'll give some percentage back to the developers. I even felt a bit strange (sorry my English ends here) when I first sold a hardware to my fellow guy for $30. How can you ask money for something created by free software? Then I said that I ask money for my work. Afterwards, I donated some to the Linux found (more than $30 :-). In the other hand, I think we should concentrate on the priorities first. I know it will hurt some, but We have 2 (or more) autorouter. I know that they are nice, and usable, and required but we have rounding errors in the code as well. Which is important? We have 3D view, but we don't have negative layers. I'm sorry, if I annoy anyone. I just want you to see my point. Levente -- Kovacs Levente leventel...@gmail.com Voice: +36705071002 ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 12:16 +0100, Kovacs Levente wrote: In the other hand, I think we should concentrate on the priorities first. I know it will hurt some, but We have 2 (or more) autorouter. I know that they are nice, and usable, and required Not a bad thing IMO.. and the toporouter not only looks like it will be able to do excellent routing, its quality output will attract users to the software. That in turn helps attract development effort (or funding for it). but we have rounding errors in the code as well. Are you thinking of the metric/imperial stuff, or the numerical issues present which keep causing the occasional bug with polygon intersections? If the latter, I've not got been able to implement the suggested snap rounding algorithm, but did have an attempt at getting some of the prerequisite Bentely Ottman intersection routines in place. (There's a branch for that ;)), No it doesn't work properly, and yes, I've virtually abandoned it for now.. other more pressing things to fix. Which is important? We have 3D view, but we don't have negative layers. I'm sorry, if I annoy anyone. I just want you to see my point. 3D view came very very easily and cheaply from work I was doing which I would deem to be of VASTLY greater importance than negative layers. PCB's rendering is SLOW. Layers are OPAQUE, so working on multi-layer boards with lots of planes is near impossible. This barrier to use needs removing, and my pcb+gl branch addresses those shortcomings. Since GL is a 3D API, adjusting the projection / modelview matrices to present the board in 3D is _REALLY_ easy. (Granted, 3D models of components was just an amusing distraction) Still, this is the kind of thing which differentiates us (badly) from other packages which CAN model boards in 3D with components. If this costs us users, it costs the project. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Peter Clifton wrote: It is even less fun if the fix is ignored or not liked by the regular developers. BTDTGNT ^_ I'm not sure what that expands to. (Meh.. Google told me what it means, never mind!) Anyhow.. if there is some patch / fix you're referring to specifically, ping it back up and someone might take an interest. Admittedly, my mini rant mixed more than one occasion: 1) I got annoyed by gnetlist not properly handling footprint attributes of multi part symbols. So I started hacking the source for a fix. On the way I discovered the more general problem that gnetlist output potentially depends on the order symbols were added to the schematic. When i presented the fix to the ml, about the only reaction I got, was a lengthy discussion with John D, who was constantly pushing his own agenda. Ok, there was Peter B, who challenged me to sketch, how my sorting algorithm would deal with some corner cases. My response remained the last post in this sub thread. Result: Whether or not power pins in separate symbols yield proper netlists, still depends on the order the symbols were entered in gschem. 2) When I tried to do scripted printing in pcb I discovered, that action strings from the command line were simply ignored. The main procedure just exited before action strings were evaluated. Once the action script got active, it exposed the next bug: GUI-less calls to many actions get caught by what was meant to be a fuse against unauthorized calls. The application exits immediately with error message. My patch got ignored several times with moths in between and it needed a rant to have a dev actually look at it. When he did, he rejected my removal of the fuse. However, the proposed solution, a special flag for GUI-less HIDs is way beyond my hacking capabilities. Nobody else dared to comment on the issue. Result: action scripts on the command line remain broken. Scripted printing cannot make sure values are shown rather than refdeses. I keep a local mini fork for printing. My print script won't work for anyone else. 3) Early during the scripted printing affair, I discovered, that almost all command line options described in the pcb manual are obsolete. When I volunteered to fix this on the ml, it was suggested to put the documentation directly in the source like it is done for actions. This seemed like a good idea, so I started hacking. Turned out that implicit alphabetical sort like it is reasonable for actions, does not quite fit for command lines. With so many options you'd want some grouping for better readability. I split my effort in two patches: Modification of the comment collection script and the bulk of documenting comments. The first patch got applied after I did some nagging. So I went ahead and spent a couple of evenings to write the documenting comments. First my patch was ignored, again. After nagging and renagging I was told, that the dev did not like the way I implemented explicit ordering. Thus the second patch got rejected. Result: The command line options section in the pcb manual still sends users to completely wrong directions. No word of warning. Long time result: I dedicate my free cycles to other open source projects -- projects, where I can achieve more with less fight and less frustration. From the outside, geda/pcb development looks like a closed shop. Since I started using geda about 2005 no fresh blood seems to have entered the circuit. Maybe I overlooked some not so noisy fellow. But I get the impression, that you were the last one to be granted dev status. The fact, that the dev list excludes mere users adds to this impression. Hope, you are not annoyed by this rant. Keep up the good work! ---)kaimartin(--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53 ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 03:26 +0100, kai-martin knaak wrote: From the outside, geda/pcb development looks like a closed shop. Since I started using geda about 2005 no fresh blood seems to have entered the circuit. Maybe I overlooked some not so noisy fellow. But I get the impression, that you were the last one to be granted dev status. The fact, that the dev list excludes mere users adds to this impression. Me and Peter B were about at the same time.. others have done great work since, including the topological auto router, work on gschem's internals, hatching code etc.., all Ben's PCB fixes. (Sorry to anyone I've forgotten!) Ineiev has written lots of PCB changes which have been committed (probably many more we haven't accepted yet - SORRY!) But no, no-one has recently been granted free commit access to the repositories recently. We seem to be following more the Xorg / ... model, where people email patches against git HEAD and one of a few maintainers commit the patches. Since we don't seem to have the manpower to do that well, we should perhaps think about how we could work differently. Even if we were to grant more developers access to the repositories, it would only be over a period of mutual getting to know each other that it would feel right for them to be pushing code changes without review. (Note that even internally, Peter B and I typically post patches somewhere for each other to review for non-trivial changes). Take the exchange recently between Stephen and I.. a lot of emails to clean up a few hundred lines of code. (And neither of us has got a final patch yet!). This is the kind of collaborative effort I've long dreamt of seeing with the gEDA and PCB projects. Sure - either one of us could have coded up the patch and had it pushed.. but I think we're ending up with better, more likely correct code changes by virtue of us both looking at things. This is a good example of how things _can_ work. Hope, you are not annoyed by this rant. Keep up the good work! I'm not annoyed - its all pretty much true. Sometimes its sad that it is true. I just hope I'm not too often the dev in question who was being obstructive.. It was probably me being hesitant about removing the CRASH() code in the default HID place-holder. (Which is what I think you were hitting). Whilst I have got _VERY_ deep inside various bits of gEDA and PCB, there are still plenty of areas where I'm not so familiar with the original design, and am hesitant to touch. gnetlist, gattrib and certain bits in the very core of PCB fit into that category. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Boiling it down greatly, Clif and Kaimartin are both asking for more attention from the maintainers. Has the gEDA community given thought to the possibility of paid maintainers ? I'm a relative newbie, please let me know if this has already been thrashed through. If it is worth discussing, I guess the big questions are: 1. Would any of the existing maintainers be able to devote more time to gEDA if they had financial support to do so ? 2. Could we raise enough money to make this viable ? ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 03:26 +0100, kai-martin knaak wrote: 3) Early during the scripted printing affair, I discovered, that almost all command line options described in the pcb manual are obsolete. When I volunteered to fix this on the ml, it was suggested to put the documentation directly in the source like it is done for actions. This seemed like a good idea, so I started hacking. Turned out that implicit alphabetical sort like it is reasonable for actions, does not quite fit for command lines. With so many options you'd want some grouping for better readability. I split my effort in two patches: Modification of the comment collection script and the bulk of documenting comments. The first patch got applied after I did some nagging. So I went ahead and spent a couple of evenings to write the documenting comments. First my patch was ignored, again. After nagging and renagging I was told, that the dev did not like the way I implemented explicit ordering. Thus the second patch got rejected. Result: The command line options section in the pcb manual still sends users to completely wrong directions. No word of warning. It is a great shame that your efforts haven't made it into the project. I hope that at least the content creation work can be salvaged, even if the developer in question feels a desire to adjust the way ordering is done. (I don't know who that was, but I guess there aren't many more possibilities than I have fingers on a hand!) Long time result: I dedicate my free cycles to other open source projects -- projects, where I can achieve more with less fight and less frustration. Your use and testing of PCB+GL has been much appreciated. It is only through brave users trying these things (and giving feedback) that things will get better. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
If you want to hire a maintainer, consider that the average senior engineer costs about $200k per year, if you include benefits - and if you want a full time engineer, you'd have to provide them because you'd be replacing their regular job. gEDA just doesn't generate that kind of revenue. As for time, we all have other committments - job, family, personal projects, etc. We fit in gEDA/PCB work as best we can. You can help by: 1. Being patient and understanding. 2. Stepping up to help as best you can. 3. Trying to find ways to improve our situation. Ranting about how bad we're doing isn't going to help us. Enough of that and we'll just move on like you're talking about. We have so few people working on code that it's very difficult to grow the developer pool, and easy to shrink it. We all have to work together to make things better. If you have a PCB patch you've written that's gone stale please feel free to keep pinging me about it. Every two weeks would be sufficient. If it's in the tracker, make sure you respond to any issues or questions posted there - if I've bumped the priority up, I agree it needs to get into the source base. If you want to become a PCB committer, the process starts by writing good patches, reviewing other people's patches, and being involved in design discussions. When it gets to the point where the maintainers are just checking in whatever you ask, you're in :-) ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 2:59 PM, DJ Delorie d...@delorie.com wrote: If you want to hire a maintainer, consider that the average senior engineer costs about $200k per year, if you include benefits - and if you want a full time engineer, you'd have to provide them because you'd be replacing their regular job. gEDA just doesn't generate that kind of revenue. I wasn't thinking of a full time maintainer - more along the lines of a couple of events in PCB's past: * I remember when we missed out on the second round of Google Summer of code funding for the toporouter. It was so disappointing! I remember thinking that $15K would have allowed a huge improvement to PCB by allowing the toporouter to be finished - but it wasn't to be. * You wrote the very useful visual DRC system with some financial help from Linux Fund. So no, I can't imagine our small community coming up with $200K per year - but I can just about bring myself to imagine we could raise $15K or so, and I know that even an amount like that can make a considerable difference. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
* You wrote the very useful visual DRC system with some financial help from Linux Fund. No, I did the schematic importer. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 3:11 PM, DJ Delorie d...@delorie.com wrote: * You wrote the very useful visual DRC system with some financial help from Linux Fund. No, I did the schematic importer. Sorry, I must have misunderstood - that was the impression I got from reading this page: http://www.linuxfund.org/press/pcb/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
There were a bunch of projects scheduled, but even LF couldn't generate enough funding for more than one of them. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 3:16 PM, DJ Delorie d...@delorie.com wrote: There were a bunch of projects scheduled, but even LF couldn't generate enough funding for more than one of them. I'm sorry to hear that :( ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 21:31 -0800, c...@eugeneweb.com wrote: Agreed, and I had a similar experience. I was hoping to get a review or just some comments on a couple of patches I submitted (3114991, 3117075). GAH, I _HATE_ SOURCEFORGE. Please quote full HTML links when citing sourceforge patches. I'd far rather see a patch emailed to me ten times than have to dig around for one on HATEforge. We CAN'T EVEN VIEW PATCHES without downloading the damned things to local storage, FINDING them and viewing locally. I'm so tempted to refuse to have any further dealings with patch management until we move to something which doesn't SUCK, e.g. Launchpad. Rant over. (SERIOUSLY THOUGH, PLEASE LETS MOVE TO Launchpad!) (PS. As a further incentive, switching to LP might well entail going through and having a thorough spring-clean of patches on HATEforge.) I now fall into the same category of people who instinctively typo Windoze instead of Microsoft Windows. For that I feel shame, and apologise. (Not feeling sorry enough to s/HATEforge/SourceForge/ though!) On the topic of your patches.. they touch the rather brittle gnetlist, and THAT is enough to make me shy away from reviewing them. Peter Brett might well be persuade to take a look at it.. he's braver than I am! (One of the patches actually came up in a private conversation a little earlier, identifying some patches we should push.) I guess on the other hand, you've done the work, and given I don't know enough to review it, I should also just give you the benefit of the doubt and push the patches. (If they were to break anything, they could always be reverted!) Let me know what you want.. either I can push the patches unread, or pass them to Peter B to see if he has time to review them. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Anthony Blake wrote:
On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 4:18 AM, Armin Faltl armin.fa...@aon.at wrote:
Anthony Blake wrote:
Yes, if you were having difficulty with the END_LOOP macro, I can
understand why you didn't venture any deeper into the code.
I had no difficulty finding or understanding the macro, but I have a huge
problem
to work on code, where others deliberately introduce stuff, that is a
maintenance
nightmare. There is a reason, the compiler disallows unmacht '{' in one
file.
Relax, the macros aren't part of an elaborate plan to *deliberately*
obfuscate the code. That file is over 15 years old.
Yes, theses macros make the code look like FORTRAN
I don't think a few 'maintenance nightmares' or matching '{' problems
are good reasons for giving up and just doing nothing instead. You
don't have to like the macros and so on to fix bugs, and IMO just
nutting up and dealing with the matching '{' issues etc is worth it to
nail a bug that may have been bothering you.
Before I can nail a bug, I have to understand the code. If I have to
look at 2 files
to understand something as simple as '}}' this gets disgusting. I don't
have the time
to learn all the peculiarities of the code to be sure of what I'm doing.
Replacing these macros can be seen as a point-fix - nothing is changed
in the logic.
That's why I would have volunteered to do that (and similiar things),
but everyone working on a branch has to apply the delta - and they don't
like to.
Its better than doing
nothing or writing large parts of PCB from scratch.
No, I believe, that if I have no thorough understanding of what I'm really
doing, I better leave the code alone or write a part between clean
interfaces
from scratch. That's because to me this app is not a toy.
When I first saw the 'productivity' of a recent contributor I was
standing in awe.
I thought - incredible, he must have an IQ of 300+ or something. Since his
handling of drilling tool path optimization and the remark on math and
simulation,
it's clear to me, how he achieves this staggering speed. By the oh - I
don't understand
it, let's ignore or rip it out-attitude.
Markus, did you realize by now, that drill file optimization is actually
the NP-hard 'traveling salesman problem'? Tons of literature and
algorithms exist for it ;-)
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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Am 06.12.2010 um 12:55 schrieb Armin Faltl: Markus, did you realize by now, that drill file optimization is actually the NP-hard 'traveling salesman problem'? Tons of literature and algorithms exist for it ;-) Sure it is, and the original algorithm is back in place. Admittedly, I only had a look at the top of the algorithm, where a comment stated sort by distance from origin or something and didn't look what the function actually does. Now, do _such_ minor annoyances hold you back from changing source code to the better? I experience such sitations often and sometimes I loose, often I win. But always, discussing a detail topic and/or implementing alternatives improves the knowledge contained in the code. Just make sure you leave a comment in the code telling about the non-improvements with these alternative approaches. The unfortunate thing about such commodity issues is, some people built up a somewhat unfriendly attitude against any code changes at all. Perhaps because each code change sends the unseen, implicit message to the original author: you were wrong or could have done better. Another, often seen attitude is it works for me, so any change can do nothing but harm. Please get over such feelings. Nobody sits down and hacks away hours and days just to point a finger to anyone. Much less they try to harm or hobble anybody. It's a totally normal affair in evolution to find improvements later in time, and _that's_ the reason why programmers start submitting patches: improve something based on previous art. So any patch should give you the feeling: my code was great, because others could improve on it and the sum of both works wouldn't exist without my original. Markus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 14:18 +0100, Markus Hitter wrote: The unfortunate thing about such commodity issues is, some people built up a somewhat unfriendly attitude against any code changes at all. Sometimes there are some good reasons against code changes: - huge increase in complexity for minimal gain. gcc 4.x may be an example for this -- for some architectures there was not much gain from 3.x, for microcontrollers there was some regression. - sometimes the basic design of software is so bad (spagetti code) that each modification will introduce bugs. - with changes the code will not work any more with old hardware or libraries or architectures. - porting to other languages or hardware can become harder - licensing may be another issue, BSD/GNU/APACHE... ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Am 06.12.2010 um 16:32 schrieb Stefan Salewski: Sometimes there are some good reasons against code changes: - huge increase in complexity for minimal gain. gcc 4.x may be an example for this -- for some architectures there was not much gain from 3.x, for microcontrollers there was some regression. - sometimes the basic design of software is so bad (spagetti code) that each modification will introduce bugs. - with changes the code will not work any more with old hardware or libraries or architectures. - porting to other languages or hardware can become harder - licensing may be another issue, BSD/GNU/APACHE... At best, these are reasons to ask the commiter to review his code to match additional criteria. How would he know what traditinal gEDA developers consider to be well formatted code, a good strategy of conditionals, or what they consider to be a huge increase? In the two months I'm on this list I've almost never seen such such a request for matching additional criteria, despite of lots of no-no criticism. Even if the commiter doesn't want to review his work for whatever reason - likely he will, as he wants to see his code in the main trunk - there's always the chance somebody can learn from this, as it solves a particular problem. Markus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Dec 6, 2010, at 9:24 AM, Markus Hitter wrote: Am 06.12.2010 um 16:32 schrieb Stefan Salewski: Sometimes there are some good reasons against code changes: - huge increase in complexity for minimal gain. gcc 4.x may be an example for this -- for some architectures there was not much gain from 3.x, for microcontrollers there was some regression. - sometimes the basic design of software is so bad (spagetti code) that each modification will introduce bugs. - with changes the code will not work any more with old hardware or libraries or architectures. - porting to other languages or hardware can become harder - licensing may be another issue, BSD/GNU/APACHE... At best, these are reasons to ask the commiter to review his code to match additional criteria. How would he know what traditinal gEDA developers consider to be well formatted code, a good strategy of conditionals, or what they consider to be a huge increase? In the two months I'm on this list I've almost never seen such such a request for matching additional criteria, despite of lots of no-no criticism. If the bug fix merely piles a kludge atop poorly designed code, it should be rejected regardless of style issues. 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:13:49 + From: Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk Subject: Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB [...] Anyhow.. if there is some patch / fix you're referring to specifically, ping it back up and someone might take an interest. I'll acknowledge that we (gEDA developers) are collectively very bad at dealing with contributions! Things get ignored because we get busy and have other commitments. We can obviously do better. If fixes weren't liked, we would probably have given a valid reason or suggested a better alternative. A balance has to be struck between accepting all patches quickly to encourage contribution, and reviewing their design implications and code quality. Regards, -- Peter Clifton Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 14:18:06 +0100 From: Markus Hitter m...@jump-ing.de Subject: Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB [...] The unfortunate thing about such commodity issues is, some people built up a somewhat unfriendly attitude against any code changes at all. Perhaps because each code change sends the unseen, implicit message to the original author: you were wrong or could have done better. Another, often seen attitude is it works for me, so any change can do nothing but harm. Please get over such feelings. Nobody sits down and hacks away hours and days just to point a finger to anyone. Much less they try to harm or hobble anybody. It's a totally normal affair in evolution to find improvements later in time, and _that's_ the reason why programmers start submitting patches: improve something based on previous art. So any patch should give you the feeling: my code was great, because others could improve on it and the sum of both works wouldn't exist without my original. Markus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/ Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 17:24:23 +0100 From: Markus Hitter m...@jump-ing.de Subject: Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB Am 06.12.2010 um 16:32 schrieb Stefan Salewski: Sometimes there are some good reasons against code changes: - huge increase in complexity for minimal gain. gcc 4.x may be an example for this -- for some architectures there was not much gain from 3.x, for microcontrollers there was some regression. - sometimes the basic design of software is so bad (spagetti code) that each modification will introduce bugs. - with changes the code will not work any more with old hardware or libraries or architectures. - porting to other languages or hardware can become harder - licensing may be another issue, BSD/GNU/APACHE... At best, these are reasons to ask the commiter to review his code to match additional criteria. How would he know what traditinal gEDA developers consider to be well formatted code, a good strategy of conditionals, or what they consider to be a huge increase? In the two months I'm on this list I've almost never seen such such a request for matching additional criteria, despite of lots of no-no criticism. Even if the commiter doesn't want to review his work for whatever reason - likely he will, as he wants to see his code in the main trunk - there's always the chance somebody can learn from this, as it solves a particular problem. Markus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/ Agreed, and I had a similar experience. I was hoping to get a review or just some comments on a couple of patches I submitted (3114991, 3117075). Now I can understand that it was probably in an off beat area and not the topic du jour, so I went ahead and posted it to the patches tracker. No comments there either, and I went to some effort to comment my code well, tried to match the formatting as best I could, and even commented the hunks in the patch set. I also contacted Stuart Brorson directly and while he said he would look at the patches he also said: As you might imagine, I'm busy with a number of other projects, so I haven't had much time to devote to gEDA for a long time. I think a lot of would be contributors are inspired to make improvements but get stymied when their first offering falls on deaf ears. I know there has to be a balance here, but I feel that there should always be someone in the dev group that can take the time to respond and give some constructive feedback. Just my 2c, Clif ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Agreed, and I had a similar experience. I was hoping to get a review or just some comments on a couple of patches I submitted (3114991, 3117075). Now I can understand that it was probably in an off beat area and not the topic du jour, so I went ahead and posted it to the patches tracker. No comments there either, and I went to some effort to comment my code well, tried to match the formatting as best I could, and even commented the hunks in the patch set. From looking at your patch I can see that you've put in some substantial work there, and can understand your disappointment. I also contacted Stuart Brorson directly and while he said he would look at the patches he also said: As you might imagine, I'm busy with a number of other projects, so I haven't had much time to devote to gEDA for a long time. I think a lot of would be contributors are inspired to make improvements but get stymied when their first offering falls on deaf ears. As a PCB developer I'm acutely aware that developer time is in very short supply - the lead developers are very busy guys who squeeze in time for PCB as best they can. I know almost nothing about the development of gschem, but my perception is that gschem developer time is even more scarce - I'd guess there are 20 emails on this list about PCB for every email about gschem. I know there has to be a balance here, but I feel that there should always be someone in the dev group that can take the time to respond and give some constructive feedback. I feel the same way - but I recognise that there currently isn't enough gschem developer time for this to be the case. I'm sorry I can't help more, but I do suggest is that you stay on the list - when the developers do come back raise the issue again. Oh, and of course gEDA is free software - if the developers disappear into a black hole you can always start your own branch and become your own maintainer. Public GIT repositories like repo.or.cz make it very easy to host a project. I made my own branch of PCB there a few weeks ago when I wanted to indulge in some source code butchery that the PCB lead developers wouldn't want to touch with a barge pole :) Setting the whole thing up took less than a day. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Stefan Salewski wrote: On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 16:13 -0500, Bob Paddock wrote: Peter, while all of this sounds great, could we fix the collective problems that we have now first? To many of us PCB is used to ship products, preferably today. Fixing problems is not always fun, especially if one is not really suffering from these problems oneself. So if we can not fix it ourself, we may consider paying other people to do that, in particular if we ship boards and earn money with it. There are blackboards for freelance engineers, to make a defined feature in opensource software. This seems a good model of payment to me. The problem to me in our case is atm: - the writer of a certain feature is not required to understand enough of the app, to avoid new bugs in other parts - the writer is not required to run extensive regression tests after the change and provide tests for his feature as well - there is noone fully coordinating the work of contributors and saveguarding the internal interfaces Since we do not have the documentation Bob requests, it's practically impossible, to meet above standards and without above quality measure in place I'm unwilling to pay any money. Btw., fixing bugs in a well designed, well documented, cleanly written application is a lot more fun than in insert_decription_of_choice and orders of magnitude faster. That's why I suggested to personally throw out BS like '#define END_LOOP }}' and all it entails. Since this was not welcomed, I decided to not try and dive into the code any further. Armin ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Armin Faltl armin.fa...@aon.at wrote: There are blackboards for freelance engineers, to make a defined feature in opensource software. This seems a good model of payment to me. The problem to me in our case is atm: - the writer of a certain feature is not required to understand enough of the app, to avoid new bugs in other parts - the writer is not required to run extensive regression tests after the change and provide tests for his feature as well - there is noone fully coordinating the work of contributors and saveguarding the internal interfaces Since we do not have the documentation Bob requests, it's practically impossible, to meet above standards and without above quality measure in place I'm unwilling to pay any money. Btw., fixing bugs in a well designed, well documented, cleanly written application is a lot more fun than in insert_decription_of_choice and orders of magnitude faster. That's why I suggested to personally throw out BS like '#define END_LOOP }}' and all it entails. Since this was not welcomed, I decided to not try and dive into the code any further. Yes, if you were having difficulty with the END_LOOP macro, I can understand why you didn't venture any deeper into the code. Best wishes, Anthony ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Yes, if you were having difficulty with the END_LOOP macro, I can understand why you didn't venture any deeper into the code. I just saw the rest of the crap in the header file containing #define END_LOOP }} and I'm with Armin on that one, this is pretty ridiculous. Fixing problems is not always fun, especially if one is not really suffering from these problems oneself. That's the problem with opensource. -tc ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 3:40 AM, timecop time...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, if you were having difficulty with the END_LOOP macro, I can understand why you didn't venture any deeper into the code. I just saw the rest of the crap in the header file containing #define END_LOOP }} and I'm with Armin on that one, this is pretty ridiculous. I don't particularly like it either. But its a weak excuse not to dive into the code any further. Best wishes, Anthony ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Anthony Blake wrote:
Yes, if you were having difficulty with the END_LOOP macro, I can
understand why you didn't venture any deeper into the code.
I had no difficulty finding or understanding the macro, but I have a
huge problem
to work on code, where others deliberately introduce stuff, that is a
maintenance
nightmare. There is a reason, the compiler disallows unmacht '{' in one
file.
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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 4:18 AM, Armin Faltl armin.fa...@aon.at wrote:
Anthony Blake wrote:
Yes, if you were having difficulty with the END_LOOP macro, I can
understand why you didn't venture any deeper into the code.
I had no difficulty finding or understanding the macro, but I have a huge
problem
to work on code, where others deliberately introduce stuff, that is a
maintenance
nightmare. There is a reason, the compiler disallows unmacht '{' in one
file.
Relax, the macros aren't part of an elaborate plan to *deliberately*
obfuscate the code. That file is over 15 years old.
I don't think a few 'maintenance nightmares' or matching '{' problems
are good reasons for giving up and just doing nothing instead. You
don't have to like the macros and so on to fix bugs, and IMO just
nutting up and dealing with the matching '{' issues etc is worth it to
nail a bug that may have been bothering you. Its better than doing
nothing or writing large parts of PCB from scratch.
Best wishes,
Anthony
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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
I don't think a few 'maintenance nightmares' or matching '{' problems
are good reasons for giving up and just doing nothing instead. You
don't have to like the macros and so on to fix bugs, and IMO just
nutting up and dealing with the matching '{' issues
Not using the real braces make style highlighting in emacs not work
well, so bugs like dangling 'else' go unnoticed.
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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 2:20 AM, Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk wrote: On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 11:15 +1100, Stephen Ecob wrote: branch.. sorry). [...] So, a mix of NOT LEAKS, and might be leaks. We need back-traces of the cases where callers are allocating things repeatedly and not freeing them. Because these are showing up in your DMalloc output as being where memory is allocated (pretty generic routines), we would need a back-trace to see which code caused the allocation before any could be fixed. Thanks for looking those over, your observations are helpful. I'll investigate further today. I believe valgrind is good at detecting leaks! So I hear. I should take the time to learn it some time :) ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Stefan Salewski wrote: Fixing problems is not always fun, especially if one is not really suffering from these problems oneself. It is even less fun if the fix is ignored or not liked by the regular developers. BTDTGNT ---)kaimartin(--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53 ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
I've looked at various commercial boards recently, and it would appear that many use negative layers to draw tracking. High power stuff, where practically everything is copper, just with some isolation between regions. The complexity of the polygons which make up these traces would be too prohibitive to use PCB's normal polygon tool. They _look_ as if someone has drawn negagtive traces to split up a plane. should we support that? Negative layers would be awesome. Having the mask as an actual negative layer would also be great, and allow some custom things to be done on with the mask (e.g. exposing copper strips along the edge for chassis/shielding connections) ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 11:15 +1100, Stephen Ecob wrote: hid/common/actions.c:269' - Can't see this one myself.. there is no exit path out of that function which fails to free that allocation! hid/common/actions.c:46' - Array of actions persistent over PCB's entire execution. Not a leak hid/common/flags.c:41' - Array of flags persistent over PCB's entire execution. Not a leak hid/common/flags.c:71' - Array of flags persistent over PCB's entire execution. Not a leak hid/common/hidinit.c:171' - Array of hids persistent over PCB's entire execution. Not a leak hid/common/hidinit.c:250' - Array of hid attributes persistent over PCB's entire execution. Not a leak hid/common/hidinit.c:659' - Not a leak as far as I can tell.. returned value should be cached / free'd elsewhere. Seems ok. hid/common/hidinit.c:688' - Think this is ok hid/gtk/gtkhid-gdk.c:352' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). hid/gtk/gui-log-window.c:150' - Cached memory allocated for log messages. Not really a leak. hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:266' - Cached memory allocated for accelerators. Not really a leak. hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:2997' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3005' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3034' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3042' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3306' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3695' - ??? (Doesn't line up with code in my checkout out branch.. sorry). main.c:780' -- Global variable. Not a leak. main.c:790' -- Global variable. Not a leak. main.c:800' -- Global variable. Not a leak. main.c:810' -- Global variable. Not a leak. main.c:820' -- Global variable. Not a leak. misc.c:1704' -- Just a returned value - some caller might be leaking though mymem.c:663' -- Just a returned value - some caller might be leaking though mymem.c:707' -- Just a returned value - some caller might be leaking though parse_l.c:2232' -- Leak in the parser? (Source file: parse_l.l) res_lex.c:1857' -- Leak in the parser? (Source file: res_lex.l) rtree.c:453' -- MIGHT be something leaking r-trees, but could also just be rtree.c:455' some allocated rtrees which are not free'd. Would need to see rtree.c:762' _increasing_ memory usage from these points to be worried. rtree.c:835' rtree.c:992' Would need a back-trace of which code caused the allocation. strflags.c:169' -- Just a returned value - some caller might be leaking though strflags.c:169' -- Just a returned value - some caller might be leaking though strflags.c:171' -- Just a returned value - some caller might be leaking though So, a mix of NOT LEAKS, and might be leaks. We need back-traces of the cases where callers are allocating things repeatedly and not freeing them. Because these are showing up in your DMalloc output as being where memory is allocated (pretty generic routines), we would need a back-trace to see which code caused the allocation before any could be fixed. I believe valgrind is good at detecting leaks! -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Bob Paddock wrote: Rick, I got line breaks. . On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Just thought I'd write some of this down and put it out there. I've spent some time recently thinking way into the future about the GUI / usability for an advanced PCB editing program. Peter, while all of this sounds great, could we fix the collective problems that we have now first? To many of us PCB is used to ship products, preferably today. The Creeping Feature Creacher is a powerful task master. +1 What we really need is good documentation for the Meta Data that contains what a pcb really is. Once MD is documented and abstracted then it should become easy to add any kind of new GUI, Router, Scripting, or just scrap the whole thing and start over. +1 PCB design is a real hybrid of art, precision engineering and black magic. It is only magic for those without documentation, or initiation. +1 Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? Appology in advance - Peter, so far I thought you are bright ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 16:13 -0500, Bob Paddock wrote: Peter, while all of this sounds great, could we fix the collective problems that we have now first? To many of us PCB is used to ship products, preferably today. Fixing problems is not always fun, especially if one is not really suffering from these problems oneself. So if we can not fix it ourself, we may consider paying other people to do that, in particular if we ship boards and earn money with it. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
What I would like to have is a more intelligent method of inserting new tracks. So if I wanted to insert a new track between two existing tracks, these two should get pushed a little bit to make space for the track inbetween. Sounds a little bit related to your idea of Sprung loaded tracking. Have a look at http://www.freerouting.net/ start the router and then watch the 45 degree routing example in the Router Demonstrations. That's a good example for the intelligent editing. Regards, Stefan ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 15:42 +1300, Anthony Blake wrote: Cool.. yeah I've always thought the future is in sketching topology and defining constraints.. sounds awesome! I remember talking about basically the same thing a couple of times over the last few years.. I was referring to it as semi-automatic routing where you sketch the topology of a net with the mouse (or some other input device). Sounds like we're thinking along similar lines. I could easily have unconsciously absorbed your ideas and suggestions without realising I was re-hashing stuff which has already been said. -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 17:22 +0100, Stefan Dröge wrote: What I would like to have is a more intelligent method of inserting new tracks. So if I wanted to insert a new track between two existing tracks, these two should get pushed a little bit to make space for the track inbetween. Sounds a little bit related to your idea of Sprung loaded tracking. Have a look at http://www.freerouting.net/ start the router and then watch the 45 degree routing example in the Router Demonstrations. That's a good example for the intelligent editing. That is indeed an awesome example. I note that freerouting.net lists gEDA as being supported.. is that true? -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Dec 2, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Bob Paddock wrote: Pleasant Experience means you get the board done sooner, which is a Good Thing. Generally, no. People love to kill time when the experience is pleasant. That's why low-productivity fritterware sells so well. But real productivity requires thought and study, something many people try hard to avoid. 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Pleasant Experience means you get the board done sooner, which is a Good Thing. Generally, no. People love to kill time when the experience is pleasant. That's why low-productivity fritterware sells so well. But real productivity requires thought and study, something many people try hard to avoid. Sorry, I can't buy the its got to be a pain to use it argument in any manner at all. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Rick Collins wrote: Someone in this list once tried to get to the bottom of it and found there were some things he could do to prevent it, This was me. The culprit is a bug in your mail client. It drops all carriage returns in mails sent with transfer encoding base64. What I did, was to advise my news client to not change the encoding in any way (I read the mailing list via gmane). but he doesn't always do whatever it was and I still get some of his without line breaks. I use different computers. I guess, the specific news reader preference did not make it to all of them. This message should display fine on your client. Does it? I would switch to T'bird, According to wikipedia, there is a project to replace the original eudora engine with an open soureced one based on thunderbird. The name of the project is penelope. Its first release under the name Eudora OSE was in September 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_(e-mail_client) Did you try this open sourced version? ---)kaimartin(--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak tel: +49-511-762-2895 Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: +49-511-762-2211 Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de GPG key:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmkop=get ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Am 03.12.2010 um 19:54 schrieb Bob Paddock: Sorry, I can't buy the its got to be a pain to use it argument in any manner at all. There's no need to buy this. A good example is simulation. The whole point of a simulation is to replace complex maths with a more pleasant experience. Undoubtly you could describe technical problems of any complexity with huge mathematical formulas, but doing a simulation is almost always much faster. Markus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Dec 3, 2010, at 11:54 AM, Bob Paddock wrote: Pleasant Experience means you get the board done sooner, which is a Good Thing. Generally, no. People love to kill time when the experience is pleasant. That's why low-productivity fritterware sells so well. But real productivity requires thought and study, something many people try hard to avoid. Sorry, I can't buy the its got to be a pain to use it argument in any manner at all. Good software isn't too much of a pain to use if you take the attitude that you're going to learn its strengths and figure out how to exploit them. But too many want to be spoon fed sugar, and find it painful when they aren't so coddled. It's the difference between being an active user of software and a passive consumer. Study and thought are difficult, but the best software rewards them. 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Dec 3, 2010, at 12:20 PM, Markus Hitter wrote: Am 03.12.2010 um 19:54 schrieb Bob Paddock: Sorry, I can't buy the its got to be a pain to use it argument in any manner at all. There's no need to buy this. A good example is simulation. The whole point of a simulation is to replace complex maths with a more pleasant experience. I disagree. The whole point of simulation is to extend the math to situations that are impractical with hand methods. But if you haven't mastered hand methods, you will have great difficulty creating effective simulations. Undoubtly you could describe technical problems of any complexity with huge mathematical formulas, but doing a simulation is almost always much faster. In many cases hand methods are faster if you know what you're doing. Simulators are stupid. You're much smarter. I do a lot of simulation, but a pencil often yields more insight. If you avoid the math because you find it unpleasant, you will be severely limited in the range of problems you can effectively tackle. 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
2010/12/3 Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk: That is indeed an awesome example. I note that freerouting.net lists gEDA as being supported.. is that true? I just searched a little bit, and I found some code from Josh Jordan on the mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/geda-user@moria.seul.org/msg19459.html But I haven't tried it out yet. Too bad that freerouting is not as free as it sounds :-( Regards, Stefan ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Peter Clifton wrote: Some randomly sorted ideas: Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? I imagine a rubber band mode of manual routing. The user would draw a coarse path between obstacles. The pcb engine takes this path and treats it like a tensioned rubber band. It may be easiest to do this while the user draws the path: Always consider a straight thick line from the current cursor position to the end of the current track. If the line touches some obstacle, use the touching point as the end of a track segment. (The rat would not jump between layers as an auto-routed trace might Well, the topo router does not support vias, anyway :-) Sprung loaded / pushed tracking would be updated if the user were to place and drag an obstacle: This could/should be possible with all tracks. No need to define a special property. | | | | | - | | | | | - | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | \ \ | | | | | | | |.\ | | | |-.| | | | | | | | | | / | | | | / / | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | protel98SE supports this kind of push mode for manual routing. In this case, the head of the currently placed track acts as user manipulated obstacle. It is very handy when doing tight layouts. IIRC, I suggested it as a potential topic for GSoC 2008 :-) I also imagined a stroked gesture where the user draws a ring around a bunch of tracks, as if to tie a rubber-band around them. This action would group them for operations such as re-routing. By the way: pcb could benefit from the notion of permanent (named) groups. Magnetic component placement Do you imagine a dedicated mesh of preferred alignment points? Simulation rendering Before dreaming about presenting simulation results in pcb, there needs to be an adequate way to do the simulation in the first place. Currently, gschem lacks GUI support for simulation. IMHO, this is the road block against wide spread use of the simulation engines supported by geda. I wish, there was a magic wand to implement these features :-) ---)kaimartin(--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak tel: +49-511-762-2895 Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: +49-511-762-2211 Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de GPG key:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmkop=get ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
2010/12/3 Stefan Dröge ste...@sdroege.de: 2010/12/3 Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk: I note that freerouting.net lists gEDA as being supported.. is that true? I just searched a little bit, and I found some code from Josh Jordan on the mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/geda-user@moria.seul.org/msg19459.html But I haven't tried it out yet. I've just tried Josh's .dsn export function, and it seems to work. So yes it's true. But there doesn't seem to be a possibillity to reimport the layout into pcb. But freerouter does the job really well. It solved the layout without any vias or unroutable nets in about 3 minutes. (To compare: pcb autorouter took about 2 Minutes, with 5 unroutable nets. The toporouter took about an hour with sometimes 0, sometimes several unrouted nets, depending on the placement of the components) Regards, Stefan ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On 12/02/2010 05:30 PM, Peter Clifton wrote: I imagined (although I've not coded to verify), that more intelligent AUTO-routing of rats against existing board geometry / routed nets would be a huge time-saver (especially if combined with more powerful features to rubber-band existing nets). I think that would be a speed tool also. On 12/03/2010 12:11 PM, Peter Clifton wrote: Sounds like we're thinking along similar lines. I could easily have unconsciously absorbed your ideas and suggestions without realising I was re-hashing stuff which has already been said. I've mentioned analogies to routing tools like push with a force field toward already placed objects, and sweep circuitry in a direction as wish list items before... I like your lasso or lariat or rubber band idea for grouping. Many of us have seen the icon on adobe photoshop for grab an irregular area by defining a line around it -- a lariat. JG ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 20:20 +0100, Markus Hitter wrote: Am 03.12.2010 um 19:54 schrieb Bob Paddock: Sorry, I can't buy the its got to be a pain to use it argument in any manner at all. There's no need to buy this. A good example is simulation. The whole point of a simulation is to replace complex maths with a more pleasant experience. Undoubtly you could describe technical problems of any complexity with huge mathematical formulas, but doing a simulation is almost always much faster. Some people do not like learning and thinking very much. So they put together some electronic devices and simulate, modify some parameters, simulate, ... Or they write some code, again without learning and thinking before, and see what the simulator/debugger shows. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On 12/03/2010 12:30 PM, Peter Clifton wrote: http://www.freerouting.net/ start the router and then watch the 45 degree routing example Good. Was that human guided, or auto? John ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
2010/12/3 John Griessen j...@ecosensory.com: http://www.freerouting.net/ start the router and then watch the 45 degree routing example Good. Was that human guided, or auto? I think this example is human guided, to show the push/shove feature. Regards, Stefan ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Hi, Thanks for reminding me. This message came through just fine. At this point I don't want to bother anyone else with it. I can normally tell that a message has been munged this way because replies are indistinguishable from the original text. But the post that started this was an original so that I thought maybe the author had sent it that way... Like I said in the other post, there are only a handful of senders that I get this problem with and only then in two mailing lists. Unfortunately one of them is the main contributor in the other mailing list so I have a hard time reading much there. Thanks for making the effort. At least I know what is going on now. At some point I'll likely switch to T'bird and have to come up the learning curve again. Rick At 01:55 PM 12/3/2010, you wrote: Rick Collins wrote: Someone in this list once tried to get to the bottom of it and found there were some things he could do to prevent it, This was me. The culprit is a bug in your mail client. It drops all carriage returns in mails sent with transfer encoding base64. What I did, was to advise my news client to not change the encoding in any way (I read the mailing list via gmane). but he doesn't always do whatever it was and I still get some of his without line breaks. I use different computers. I guess, the specific news reader preference did not make it to all of them. This message should display fine on your client. Does it? I would switch to T'bird, According to wikipedia, there is a project to replace the original eudora engine with an open soureced one based on thunderbird. The name of the project is penelope. Its first release under the name Eudora OSE was in September 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_(e-mail_client) Did you try this open sourced version? ---)kaimartin(--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak tel: +49-511-762-2895 Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: +49-511-762-2211 Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de GPG key:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmkop=get ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk wrote: As I see it, PCB priorities (for me at least) are approximately: Release? Merge 2D parts of PCB+GL drawing Release? Merge 3D parts of PCB+GL drawing GUI to control PCB+GL rendering styles Release? Before that first release on your list I'd love to see the health of the code improved. This week I've finished my latest board (25 sq. inches, 2 layer lots of complex polygon based partial power planes). The biggest problems I had were: * Lots of segfaults. Usual triggers: 1. Find on a complex net 2. Manipulation of complex polygons, including use of MorphPolygon() * Strange GTK HID UI bug - when drawing new traces the helpful outline that appears whilst moving the mouse disappears. This leaves you in the dark, guessing where the trace will appear in 45\_ or 45_/ mode is hard. Only comes up after a few minutes of editing a complex board. Work-around is to restart PCB (painful as I lose window layout, layer visibility and command history). * lots of memory leaks - wasn't actually a problem with 4GB RAM, but I could see the address space steadily disappearing during long runs of my high effort autorouter hack. Memory leaks generally aren't show stoppers, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable about starting to code new features if the existing code was first clean and stable. FWIW a quick run of dmalloc showed the following specific leaks, plus plenty of anonymous ones. hid/common/actions.c:269' hid/common/actions.c:46' hid/common/flags.c:41' hid/common/flags.c:71' hid/common/hidinit.c:171' hid/common/hidinit.c:250' hid/common/hidinit.c:659' hid/common/hidinit.c:688' hid/gtk/gtkhid-gdk.c:352' hid/gtk/gui-log-window.c:150' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:266' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:2997' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3005' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3034' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3042' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3306' hid/gtk/gui-top-window.c:3695' main.c:780' main.c:790' main.c:800' main.c:810' main.c:820' misc.c:1704' mymem.c:663' mymem.c:707' parse_l.c:2232' res_lex.c:1857' rtree.c:453' rtree.c:455' rtree.c:762' rtree.c:835' rtree.c:992' strflags.c:169' strflags.c:169' strflags.c:171' ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Hi guys, Just thought I'd write some of this down and put it out there. I've spent some time recently thinking way into the future about the GUI / usability for an advanced PCB editing program. I started along the lines of... how would PCB design work if my input device was a graphics tablet (something akin to the Wacom Cintiq would be awesome). PCB design is a real hybrid of art, precision engineering and black magic. For laying tracks, some gestural actions, fluid drawing and possibly even multi-touch interfaces might provide user interface opportunities never before seen in this kind of CAD application. Some randomly sorted ideas: Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? This is not quite the same as auto-routing a single net. Each rat would only avoid existing laid down geometry, and would be allowed to cross other rat lines. Also, I'd imagine flattening any route generated to be in the rats plane. (The rat would not jump between layers as an auto-routed trace might, even if the route taken could only be made effectively through multiple layers). Obviously this is nice, as the user can pick rat-lines which have routed well and request PCB turns the rats into solid tracking. Manually placed, rubber-banded topological tracking? How about guiding a track routing by drawing the topology you desire, weaving in and out of other components? The topology between obstacles could easily be extracted from a hand-stroked line drawn with a pen, mouse, or perhaps some high-resolution touch-screen interface. Dynamic zooming about the current touch-point / mouse cursor when drawing in amongst detailed objects, or the user is forced to slow down would aid lower resolution input devices. Rendering would have to be FAST and slick to pull this off without disorienting the user. Following topological drawing, tracks could be allowed to evolve as if they were sprung-loaded (à la liquid-pcb), or processed through some routine to solidify them. For sprung loaded tracking, I'd imagine having a virtual obstacle object the user can place on the board to constrain the tracking. Sprung loaded / pushed tracking would be updated if the user were to place and drag an obstacle: | | | | | - | | | | | - | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | \ \ | | | | | | | |.\ | | | |-.| | | | | | | | | | / | | | | / / | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | I also imagined a stroked gesture where the user draws a ring around a bunch of tracks, as if to tie a rubber-band around them. This action would group them for operations such as re-routing. I wonder if this requires the notion of treating individual track-segments as a topology. This would be handy anyway, to aid manual rubber-banding. Drawing could potentially be made quicker if we had higher-level data than individual line-segments (it would reduce the number of round capped sections requiring drawing). Magnetic component placement An augmentation to the grid really - make components resist being pushed past favourable alignment points with other components? This wouldn't STOP components being placed off these points, just give some resistance. This feature would also be quite neat for component placement, where some future addition of a courtyard / mechanical interference spec. within the package definition would constrain placement to resist motion closer to other packages than desirable. This could be absolutely enforced when placing a component, or act to PUSH the component being run into. (Obviously dependant on a good algorithm to re-track the pushed part). I was imagining this feature being useful for placing an array of parts such as resistors / capacitors. We would need the ability to semi-lock tracks I think... Obviously some tracks won't be up for auto-pushing, and their geometry will be set in copper (to adapt a metaphor). Obviously it should be possible to edit such tracks, but we might want the to be un-pushable. How about more novel ways to define planes? Full pours support goes without saying ;) I've looked at various commercial boards recently, and it would appear that many use negative layers to draw tracking. High power stuff, where practically everything is copper, just with some isolation between regions. The complexity of the polygons which make up these traces would be too prohibitive to use PCB's normal polygon tool. They _look_ as if someone has drawn negagtive traces to split up a plane. should we support that? Alternatively, what about defining traces / topology for connected copper, then having a bloat until clearance hit mode, which fattens / fills everything? I'm still tempted to think that negative lines gives greater editing potential once the tracks are placed.
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Was it just me that got a copy with no paragraph breaks? Looking at the ascii art I assume it was sent with line breaks somewhere. Rick At 03:02 PM 12/2/2010, you wrote: Hi guys, Just thought I'd write some of this down and put it out there. I've spent some time recently thinking way into the future about the GUI / usability for an advanced PCB editing program. I started along the lines of... how would PCB design work if my input device was a graphics tablet (something akin to the Wacom Cintiq would be awesome). PCB design is a real hybrid of art, precision engineering and black magic. For laying tracks, some gestural actions, fluid drawing and possibly even multi-touch interfaces might provide user interface opportunities never before seen in this kind of CAD application. Some randomly sorted ideas: Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? This is not quite the same as auto-routing a single net. Each rat would only avoid existing laid down geometry, and would be allowed to cross other rat lines. Also, I'd imagine flattening any route generated to be in the rats plane. (The rat would not jump between layers as an auto-routed trace might, even if the route taken could only be made effectively through multiple layers). Obviously this is nice, as the user can pick rat-lines which have routed well and request PCB turns the rats into solid tracking. Manually placed, rubber-banded topological tracking? How about guiding a track routing by drawing the topology you desire, weaving in and out of other components? The topology between obstacles could easily be extracted from a hand-stroked line drawn with a pen, mouse, or perhaps some high-resolution touch-screen interface. Dynamic zooming about the current touch-point / mouse cursor when drawing in amongst detailed objects, or the user is forced to slow down would aid lower resolution input devices. Rendering would have to be FAST and slick to pull this off without disorienting the user. Following topological drawing, tracks could be allowed to evolve as if they were sprung-loaded (Ã la liquid-pcb), or processed through some routine to solidify them. For sprung loaded tracking, I'd imagine having a virtual obstacle object the user can place on the board to constrain the tracking. Sprung loaded / pushed tracking would be updated if the user were to place and drag an obstacle: | | | | | - | | | | | - | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | \ \ | | | | | | | |.\ | | | |-.| | | | | | | | | | / | | | | / / | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | I also imagined a stroked gesture where the user draws a ring around a bunch of tracks, as if to tie a rubber-band around them. This action would group them for operations such as re-routing. I wonder if this requires the notion of treating individualtrack-segments as a topology. This would be handy anyway, to aid manual rubber-banding. Drawing could potentially be made quicker if we had higher-level data than individual line-segments (it would reduce the number of round capped sections requiring drawing). Magnetic component placement An augmentation to the grid really - make components resist being pushed past favourable alignment points with other components? This wouldn't STOP components being placed off these points, just give some resistance. This feature would also be quite neat for component placement, where some future addition of a courtyard / mechanical interference spec. within the package definition would constrain placement to resist motion closer to other packages than desirable. This could be absolutely enforced when placing a component, or act to PUSH the component being run into. (Obviously dependant on a good algorithm to re-track the pushed part). I was imagining this feature being useful for placing an array of parts such as resistors / capacitors. We would need the ability to semi-lock tracks I think... Obviously some tracks won't be up for auto-pushing, and their geometry will be set in copper (to adapt a metaphor). Obviously it should be possible to edit such tracks, but we might want the to be un-pushable. How about more novel ways to define planes? Full pours support goes without saying ;) I've looked at various commercial boards recently, and it would appear that many use negative layers to draw tracking. High power stuff, where practically everything is copper, just with some isolation between regions. The complexity of the polygons which make up these traces would be too prohibitive to use PCB's normal polygon tool. They _look_ as if someone has drawn negagtive traces to split up a plane. should we support that? Alternatively, what about defining traces / topology for
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 15:46 -0500, Rick Collins wrote: Was it just me that got a copy with no paragraph breaks? Looking at the ascii art I assume it was sent with line breaks somewhere. Rick I got it back with line-breaks! I've just re-installed, so it is possible some setting is off in my mail client though. It is auto-wrapping paragraphs here, but the ascii art did indeed have newlines. Looks like something (your mail reader?) has decided it knows better about the line-breaking and re-flowed the text? Are you on Windows / Linux / ...? Could it be a line-ending issue? -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Rick, I got line breaks. . On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Peter Clifton pc...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Just thought I'd write some of this down and put it out there. I've spent some time recently thinking way into the future about the GUI / usability for an advanced PCB editing program. Peter, while all of this sounds great, could we fix the collective problems that we have now first? To many of us PCB is used to ship products, preferably today. The Creeping Feature Creacher is a powerful task master. What we really need is good documentation for the Meta Data that contains what a pcb really is. Once MD is documented and abstracted then it should become easy to add any kind of new GUI, Router, Scripting, or just scrap the whole thing and start over. PCB design is a real hybrid of art, precision engineering and black magic. It is only magic for those without documentation, or initiation. Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? Do different rat lines help ship products? Not that I see. To me that is the criteria for any feature. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thursday 02 December 2010 21:13:47 Bob Paddock wrote: Peter, while all of this sounds great, could we fix the collective problems that we have now first? Like what, specifically? Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? Do different rat lines help ship products? Not that I see. To me that is the criteria for any feature. Does Peter C's OpenGL renderer help ship products? Not that I see, but it make PCB a hell of a lot of a more pleasant experience to use. Peter (B) -- Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk Remote Sensing Research Group Surrey Space Centre signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 03:46:55PM -0500, Rick Collins wrote: Was it just me that got a copy with no paragraph breaks? Looking at the ascii art I assume it was sent with line breaks somewhere. I got a copy with correct line-breaks. I think it's just you. -- Andrew Poelstra Email: asp11 at sfu.ca OR apoelstra at wpsoftware.net Web: http://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 16:13 -0500, Bob Paddock wrote: Scrap straight line rats in favour of using the topological auto-router? Do different rat lines help ship products? Not that I see. I imagined (although I've not coded to verify), that more intelligent AUTO-routing of rats against existing board geometry / routed nets would be a huge time-saver (especially if combined with more powerful features to rubber-band existing nets). I forget the name used elsewhere, but the idea is akin to user-guided auto-routing, net by net. The rat-lines would show the routes each net would take (if chosen to be routed next). I was just throwing some ideas out there as food for thought (and so I don't forget them). I've got too many little .txt files lying around with one or two little ideas / design fragments, and I rarely come back to them! As I see it, PCB priorities (for me at least) are approximately: Release? Merge 2D parts of PCB+GL drawing Release? Merge 3D parts of PCB+GL drawing GUI to control PCB+GL rendering styles Release? Gather design details of file-format changes required for: 3D model support Package instantiation as offset + rotation, NOT duplication and in place modification (Also buys better rotation support) Arbitrary layer types Pad stacks Polygon pours Negative objects? Better polygon data-structures? Storage of layer colours / stack definitions Implement file-format changes (possible totally new file format?) Arbitrary layer types / stacks Arbitrary pad types / stacks Release? Pours support Release? 3D model support Release? OTHER STUFF I TALKED ABOUT -- 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
Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter TB Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk wrote: On Thursday 02 December 2010 21:13:47 Bob Paddock wrote: Peter, while all of this sounds great, could we fix the collective problems that we have now first? Like what, specifically? The 446 bugs in the tracker are a good start. Does Peter C's OpenGL renderer help ship products? Not that I see, but it make PCB a hell of a lot of a more pleasant experience to use. Pleasant Experience means you get the board done sooner, which is a Good Thing. -- http://blog.softwaresafety.net/ http://www.designer-iii.com/ http://www.wearablesmartsensors.com/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
