subject:"gEDA\-user\: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg"


On Aug 11, 2009, at 6:35 PM, DJ Delorie wrote:

 gEDA provides flexibility.  This allows for multiple workflows.  Power
 users can use this flexibility to custom tailor their workflow.  Fine,
 so far.  However, not everyone is a power user.

If you try to use a chainsaw as if it was a hand saw it will seem  
very clumsy.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


 If you try to use a chainsaw as if it was a hand saw it will seem
 very clumsy.

As someone who uses a chainsaw often, I find that analogy stupid[*].

A chainsaw is a perfect example of what gEDA is *not*.  Anyone
familiar with chainsaws can pick up pretty much any chainsaw and do
most of what you'd need to do with a chainsaw.  Despite differences,
it's easy to figure out how to prime and start it, what the safety and
operational features are, and how to use it correctly.  Assuming you
know how to use chainsaws in general, of course.

But it's more than just a tool for cutting up firewood.  I've seen
people sculpt statues with it, cut rough window openings with it, do
post and beam construction, and even shave 1/16 off the length of a
beam.  Heck, I've used it while camping to carve a bowl to eat stew
out of.  None of these uses preclude its ease of use for common
operations.

As for gEDA, I think we can assume that our target audience knows
something about EDA (or is trying to learn something about EDA).
We're not targetting economics majors or chefs or other non-EDA
people.  For a majority of the EDA crowd, gEDA needs to just work as
an EDA workflow.  Anyone familiar with EDA should be able to install
it and do common EDA stuff.  Yet, people familiar with gEDA who wish
to work outside the box should be able to do so also.


[*] Especially as I've used a chain saw in a situtation where a hand
saw normally would have been used, and it was an elegant solution
to my problem.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 12, 2009, at 9:44 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:


 If you try to use a chainsaw as if it was a hand saw it will seem
 very clumsy.

 As someone who uses a chainsaw often, I find that analogy stupid[*].

 A chainsaw is a perfect example of what gEDA is *not*.  Anyone
 familiar with chainsaws can pick up pretty much any chainsaw and do
 most of what you'd need to do with a chainsaw.  Despite differences,
 it's easy to figure out how to prime and start it, what the safety and
 operational features are, and how to use it correctly.  Assuming you
 know how to use chainsaws in general, of course.

Yes, and that last sentence is my point. gEDA is a chainsaw in a  
world of where most only know handsaws.


 But it's more than just a tool for cutting up firewood.  I've seen
 people sculpt statues with it, cut rough window openings with it, do
 post and beam construction, and even shave 1/16 off the length of a
 beam.  Heck, I've used it while camping to carve a bowl to eat stew
 out of.  None of these uses preclude its ease of use for common
 operations.

 As for gEDA, I think we can assume that our target audience knows
 something about EDA (or is trying to learn something about EDA).

Yes. They know how to use a handsaw. The problem is they've never  
seen the elements of a power tool (Makefile, pipeline, script,  
revision control system, ...). Or are frightened of them, as a lot of  
people are of power tools.

 We're not targetting economics majors or chefs or other non-EDA
 people.  For a majority of the EDA crowd, gEDA needs to just work as
 an EDA workflow.  Anyone familiar with EDA should be able to install
 it and do common EDA stuff.

Anyone familiar with a handsaw should be able to use a chainsaw do  
do common forestry without learning anything new. I don't think so...

   Yet, people familiar with gEDA who wish
 to work outside the box should be able to do so also.


 [*] Especially as I've used a chain saw in a situtation where a hand
 saw normally would have been used, and it was an elegant solution
 to my problem.

You had to start the engine, didn't you? I bet you didn't try to cut  
by pushing it back and forth by hand! That's the difficulty with  
gEDA: people familiar with less flexible, lower productivity systems  
find learning how to fuel it, oil it, and start its engine an  
intolerable burden. They expect it to work like a hand tool.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-12 Thread Peter TB Brett

On Wednesday 12 August 2009 17:35:21 John Doty wrote:
 [stuff]

This doesn't seem like a very constructive conversation, and neither does it 
seem to be making any progress towards an interesting conclusion.  Could you 
gentlemen please take it off-list?

Cheers,

  Peter

-- 
Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-12 Thread Bill Gatliff

John Doty wrote:
 On Aug 12, 2009, at 9:44 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:

   
 If you try to use a chainsaw as if it was a hand saw it will seem
 very clumsy.
   
 As someone who uses a chainsaw often, I find that analogy stupid[*].

 A chainsaw is a perfect example of what gEDA is *not*.  Anyone
 familiar with chainsaws can pick up pretty much any chainsaw and do
 most of what you'd need to do with a chainsaw.  Despite differences,
 it's easy to figure out how to prime and start it, what the safety and
 operational features are, and how to use it correctly.  Assuming you
 know how to use chainsaws in general, of course.
 

 Yes, and that last sentence is my point. gEDA is a chainsaw in a  
 world of where most only know handsaws.
   

Waitaminit, how did we get into a discussion on power vs. hand tools?  I
thought this thread was about improving the out-of-the-box gEDA experience!?

Gosh, miss a day and miss a lot... but I was only gone for eight
hours...  :)


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


  Assuming you know how to use chainsaws in general, of course.
 
 Yes, and that last sentence is my point. gEDA is a chainsaw in a
 world of where most only know handsaws.

I think you're trying too hard to bend my analogy to your needs.  I
suspect that, no matter what anyone else says, you'll figure out a way
to say that our users are too stupid to do what we want to make them
do, when in reality, they shouldn't *have* to adapt to our way - we
should offer them something that's familiar to them, even if it's just
a starting point, in order to reduce the barriers to them trying gEDA.

I've spent some time recently with Xilinx's ISE tool.  It's to FPGAs
what gEDA is to PCBs.  It consists of a number of command line tools
wrapped in a GUI.  When I first installed it, I didn't want to figure
out all the command line options for all the tools, I wanted to write
some verilog and put it in a chip.  I wanted *results* and I wanted
them *fast*.  The GUI helped me do that.  Later on, I figured out the
command line tools so I could put them in a Makefile, but I never
would have gotten to that point if I hadn't had the GUI to help me get
started.

gEDA needs to be like that.  It needs to - at least at first - offer
an easy and OBVIOUS workflow for the common users' needs.  The
learning curve for doing basic stuff should be small.  If the user
sticks to it, more options are available later.  Let them learn all
those things as they're needed, not force them to learn it all up
front.

 They expect it to work like a hand tool.

As a woodworker, I find this analogy inappropriate - hand tools
require *much* more care and tuning than, say, power tools.  Anyone
can pick up a chain saw and cut firewood.  How many people can put a
mirror edge on a hand plane and use it to flatten a table?  Anyone can
cut a straight line with a table saw.  How many can do so with a
ryoba?  How many people even know what a ryoba *is*?

We're offering gEDA to people who *are* familiar with this type of
tool.  If we make it too different than all the other tools of this
type, people won't use it only because they can't figure out how to
get their common tasks done easily enough.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 11, 2009, at 5:22 PM, spuzzdawg wrote:


I think that this is basically an argument in usability vs
flexibility. John is basically arguing that gEDA's lack of
restrictions means that it can be used for a multitude of tasks. A
person's workflow can be developed to the user's taste

It's not just the user's taste. The customer may have requirements  
you have to meet. I have a customer on the far side of the world who  
wants schematic design from me, but they have a different contractor  
they prefer for board design and fab. gEDA, as a toolkit, not an  
integrated tool, is ideal in this case.

 rather than
through wrestling against the program.
On the other hand, Kai is arguing that you need to be a gEDA  
 expert,
understand the intricacies of backends and front ends to accomplish
even the simplest task.

To use the chainsaw, you have to fuel it, oil it, start it, ...

For small jobs I'll pull out the bowsaw. But the bowsaw doesn't scale  
well to big jobs.

My opinion is that to a certain extent, both approaches are  
 correct.
If I'm designing a circuit board I want to be able to click on a
component and add it in to my schematic and then flip to pcb  
 view and
put it on the board with some tracks.

Then you want an integrated tool. That's not what gEDA is. It's a  
toolkit.

 With gEDA I need to understand
symbol properties to assign a footprint. I need to know about M4
footprints vs the newer style.

That's pcb, not gEDA. They are not the same thing. gEDA supports many  
ways to get to a PCB (or an IC, simulation, BOM, ...).

 The only way to find out the correct
footprint name to use is too look through the footprint files in a
folder that changes depending on the method of install.

Changes even more if the layout shop uses software you don't have ;-)

 If the
footprint doesn't exist I need to create it using a cryptic  
 language.
Some basic functions, like moving a component to an absolute  
 location,
only have a command line action with no gui counterpart. Users then
have to email the mailing list to find out what all the hidden
functionality is because the documentation exists but is very  
 hard to
find and decipher.

That's pcb, not gEDA.

Sure gEDA is more flexible than other programs, but this  
 flexibility
is really a hinderence to my workflow

Is it really a hindrance? Are you only doing very small jobs? GUI is  
quicker for doing something a few times. But when you need to do the  
same thing repeatedly for a selection of 5000 items, scripting is  
much faster. Also, GUI is so pleasant people don't notice what a time  
waster it is.

 and I'm sure others are turned
away for similar reasons.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-12 Thread Dave N6NZ

DJ Delorie wrote:
 Assuming you know how to use chainsaws in general, of course.
 Yes, and that last sentence is my point. gEDA is a chainsaw in a
 world of where most only know handsaws.
 
 I think you're trying too hard to bend my analogy to your needs.  I
 suspect that, no matter what anyone else says, you'll figure out a way
 to say that our users are too stupid to do what we want to make them
 do, when in reality, they shouldn't *have* to adapt to our way - we
 should offer them something that's familiar to them, even if it's just
 a starting point, in order to reduce the barriers to them trying gEDA.

That's a start.  And it's good.  But it's a very modest goal.

 I wanted *results* and I wanted
 them *fast*. 

Yes, good point.

Warning: Rants may follow.  This is not to be interpreted as flame-bait. 
   That is not my intention. This is an old phart giving you a piece of 
his mind while chomping on a rancid cigar.  You can take the criticism 
as you will -- how you react to it says more about you than about gEDA.

--- stop reading now if you are easily offended 

So far, I've stayed out of this discussion because I got bored of 
ranting about EDA tools some time around 1987.  What I find 
disheartening in this whole thread is:

1. Lack of perspective
2. Lack of a desire for excellence
3. Rampant gEDA fan-boi-ism that blinds people to it's weaknesses.

Look, I've used 1981-era EDA tools.  They sucked.  They sucked in 
exactly the same way that gEDA sucks, because gEDA is a 1981-era EDA 
tool.  I look at this discussion and shake my head because people seem 
to have as their highest goal making a better 1981-era EDA tool.

Come on, people, aim higher.  The EDA world has learned and re-learned a 
lot of lessons in the past 30 years.  Why isn't gEDA interested in 
leading the way?  Why is gEDA only interested in re-inventing 1980's 
suckage?  Where is the desire for excellence?

As to gEDA being a power tool oh, puuullleeeze.  gEDA won't scale 
to anything meaningful.  In the 1980's I was a mainframe CPU designer -- 
think 30-40 engineers plus 30-40 techs all trying to get the schematics 
correct.  gEDA would be a nightmare in that kind of a project.  I can't 
imagine using gEDA on anything bigger than a 40 sheet or so, one person 
project.  And even then, gschem needs a good off-page signal 
cross-referencer.  (Cue the fan-boi: Just write a script! Ha ha... 
come back when you grow up.  That needs to be built in and just work.)

Anyway, 80 engg+tech projects are long behind us.  I've seen CPU design 
projects with 350+ engineers and 10's of thousands of sheets of 
schematics.  When gEDA can scale to that, it will be a power tool. 
Until then, drop your delusions of grandeur.  It's getting in the way of 
your seeing the scalability and usability problems in geda.

gschem is a toy-scale tool for toy-scale projects.  It has 1980's era 
interfaces, functionality, and problems.  Most of these problems are 
well known.  Many are even well solved in other tools.

Please, set your sights higher, fast-forward 2 or 3 decades, go see what 
the other guys do, and try to produce a tool that actually *is* excellent.

rant off---

Now excuse me while I chase some kids off my lawn.

-dave


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 12, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Peter TB Brett wrote:

 On Wednesday 12 August 2009 17:35:21 John Doty wrote:
 [stuff]

 This doesn't seem like a very constructive conversation, and  
 neither does it
 seem to be making any progress towards an interesting conclusion.   
 Could you
 gentlemen please take it off-list?

Let me suggest a conclusion, then. A major issue is the gEDA-pcb  
flow. As far as I can tell, gEDA is the toolkit generally used to  
feed pcb because it's the only tool or toolkit flexible enough. But  
what many pcb users apparently would prefer is a schematic plugin to  
pcb.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-12 Thread John Griessen

Dave N6NZ wrote:
 gschem is a toy-scale tool for toy-scale projects.  It has 1980's era 
 interfaces, functionality, and problems.  Most of these problems are 
 well known.  Many are even well solved in other tools.
 
 Please, set your sights higher, fast-forward 2 or 3 decades, go see what 
 the other guys do, and try to produce a tool that actually *is* excellent.
 
 rant off---

John Doty was thinking of aiming high in the thread named multi-part symbol 
support
when he offered to help with some scheme/guile coding to keep the intended 
flexibility
level of gschem/gnetlist up where it is.  Kai-Martin and DJ didn't seem to care 
about
lost flexibility.There's no overall performance goal the developers agree 
on.

So, with no one talking about high goals, I don't see such a problem in John 
Doty's wanting to
limit patches being applied that detract from the front--middle--back-end 
separation
of where workflows get defined.   If no one's talking high and long goals, why 
not think small.

John Griessen

PS  I think a windows port would be great for attracting more developers, maybe 
even ones that
want fancy user interfaces.  Things like layout vs. schematic cross probing...a 
proven boon to system design.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 12, 2009, at 11:22 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:


 Assuming you know how to use chainsaws in general, of course.

 Yes, and that last sentence is my point. gEDA is a chainsaw in a
 world of where most only know handsaws.

 I think you're trying too hard to bend my analogy to your needs.

Your analogy? I believe it was mine ;-) And from here it looks like  
you don't want to consider my point.

   I
 suspect that, no matter what anyone else says, you'll figure out a way
 to say that our users are too stupid to do what we want to make them

Not stupid. Stubborn. I don't know why engineering schools teach  
you're a specialist and you should fear what you don't understand.  
As a physicist, I was required to take a class that relentlessly and  
explicitly taught the opposite.

 do, when in reality, they shouldn't *have* to adapt to our way - we
 should offer them something that's familiar to them, even if it's just
 a starting point, in order to reduce the barriers to them trying gEDA.

 I've spent some time recently with Xilinx's ISE tool.  It's to FPGAs
 what gEDA is to PCBs.

No it's not. gEDA is a general purpose toolkit, one (and only one) of  
whose applications is feeding your pcb program. ISE is much, much  
more specialized.

   It consists of a number of command line tools
 wrapped in a GUI.  When I first installed it, I didn't want to figure
 out all the command line options for all the tools, I wanted to write
 some verilog and put it in a chip.  I wanted *results* and I wanted
 them *fast*.  The GUI helped me do that.  Later on, I figured out the
 command line tools so I could put them in a Makefile, but I never
 would have gotten to that point if I hadn't had the GUI to help me get
 started.

I have no objection to wrappers. What I object to is the constant  
demand to fix perceived problems by violating the fairly clean,  
modular nature of the kit. Rather, we need to make things *more*  
modular (e.g. get the hardwired behavior out of the gnetlist front end).


 gEDA needs to be like that.  It needs to - at least at first - offer
 an easy and OBVIOUS workflow for the common users' needs.  The
 learning curve for doing basic stuff should be small.  If the user
 sticks to it, more options are available later.  Let them learn all
 those things as they're needed, not force them to learn it all up
 front.

 They expect it to work like a hand tool.

 As a woodworker, I find this analogy inappropriate - hand tools
 require *much* more care and tuning than, say, power tools.

So run the analogy the other way if you wish. Someone who attempts to  
use a hand tool as if it is a power tool will be frustrated, but  
turning it into a power tool is not the answer.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-12 Thread Peter TB Brett

On Wednesday 12 August 2009 17:53:35 Peter TB Brett wrote:
 On Wednesday 12 August 2009 17:35:21 John Doty wrote:
  [stuff]

 This doesn't seem like a very constructive conversation, and neither does
 it seem to be making any progress towards an interesting conclusion.  Could
 you gentlemen please take it off-list?


Just think how awesome gEDA would be if the amount of effort y'all put into 
writing code was equal to the amount of energy you're putting into this 
ultimately futile flamewar.

 Peter


-- 
Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


 And from here it looks like you don't want to consider my point.

Your point is that gEDA is a powerful flexible collection of tools
that motivated people can (and should) use to do wildly different
things.

My point is that that will never happen if people can't even justify
trying it because the initial learning curve is too high.

I've conceeded your point many times, but that doesn't preclude me
wanting to add some structure to help people get started.

 No it's not. gEDA is a general purpose toolkit, one (and only one) of  
 whose applications is feeding your pcb program. ISE is much, much  
 more specialized.

Given the wide range of things that ISE can do, I think it qualifies
as as much of a general purpose toolkit (in it's realm) as gEDA does
(in its realm).

I mean, if you want to take the gEDA is a general purpose toolkit
too far, I say we just ship everyone a C compiler and let them put
together whatever kind of EDA tool they want.  When we create a
package like gEDA, the value in the package is not just the pieces
within, but how they work together, and how well that combination
solves the user's problems.  Perhaps a gschem-pcb flow is sufficient
for most people, perhaps we need to add a gschem-spice flow instead.
Or a gschem-fpga flow.  Maybe we need to focus on a point-n-click
send this board/chip to fab database.  But what we have now doesn't
have enough hand-holding guidance to get people started, regardless of
what they want to do.

 I have no objection to wrappers. What I object to is the constant
 demand to fix perceived problems by violating the fairly clean,
 modular nature of the kit. Rather, we need to make things *more*
 modular (e.g. get the hardwired behavior out of the gnetlist front
 end).

I'm not arguing against your desire to keep geda modular, or to demand
that things be fixed one way or another.  This is the geda just hit
slashdot thread, and the original problem noted (on /.) was that gEDA
is too hard to get started with *because there was no Windows
installer*.  What gEDA did was irrelevent because it never even made
it to the user's PC.

Expecting a hardware designer to think outside the box is one thing.
Expecting him to become an expert in an unrelated field (cygwin, gcc,
packaging, posix-like build environments, C, where did I put that
guile-on-windows FAQ?) is too much - he'll just download something
else that works out of the box.

 So run the analogy the other way if you wish. Someone who attempts to  
 use a hand tool as if it is a power tool will be frustrated, but  
 turning it into a power tool is not the answer.

It runs either way.  People downloading an EDA package expect it to
run, at least somewhat, like all the other EDA packages.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


 Kai-Martin and DJ didn't seem to care about lost flexibility.

I care a great deal about lost flexibility.  I just don't want
flexibility to preclude ease-of-use.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


 Just think how awesome gEDA would be if the amount of effort y'all
 put into writing code was equal to the amount of energy you're
 putting into this ultimately futile flamewar.

When dealing with human factors issues, a lot of energy *needs* to be
spent up front figuring out what the problems are.  You can't code
your way out of a misunderstanding about what the user wants.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 12, 2009, at 12:01 PM, Dave N6NZ wrote:

 Come on, people, aim higher.  The EDA world has learned and re- 
 learned a
 lot of lessons in the past 30 years.  Why isn't gEDA interested in
 leading the way?  Why is gEDA only interested in re-inventing 1980's
 suckage?  Where is the desire for excellence?

 As to gEDA being a power tool oh, puuullleeeze.  gEDA won't  
 scale
 to anything meaningful.

The fellow looking over my shoulder just said You're living proof to  
the contrary. ;-)

   In the 1980's I was a mainframe CPU designer --
 think 30-40 engineers plus 30-40 techs all trying to get the  
 schematics
 correct.  gEDA would be a nightmare in that kind of a project.  I  
 can't
 imagine using gEDA on anything bigger than a 40 sheet or so, one  
 person
 project.

Certainly the scaling that gEDA currently excels at is cutting  
projects that would normally require a team down to a size that one  
part-timer can tackle. You can't understand how *extremely* grateful  
I am for this.

   And even then, gschem needs a good off-page signal
 cross-referencer.  (Cue the fan-boi: Just write a script! Ha ha...
 come back when you grow up.  That needs to be built in and just work.)

This gets a bit tricky in a reuse situation where the same schematic  
is used in several contexts. An efficient gEDA flow has a lot in  
common with a software development flow. And software folks know some  
things about cutting big jobs down to size that most hardware folks  
don't. I haven't heard anybody complain that you have to run a  
separate tool like Doxygen to get a call graph in a typical software  
development situation.


 Anyway, 80 engg+tech projects are long behind us.  I've seen CPU  
 design
 projects with 350+ engineers and 10's of thousands of sheets of
 schematics.  When gEDA can scale to that, it will be a power tool.
 Until then, drop your delusions of grandeur.  It's getting in the  
 way of
 your seeing the scalability and usability problems in geda.

What I don't want to see is a *need* for a 350+ team. And in my  
field, when you see a big team it's certain that this is dictated by  
*institutional* needs, not by the real needs of the job.


 gschem is a toy-scale tool for toy-scale projects.

I like to achieve large scale goals with toy-scale means. The HETE-2  
ground comms network came in at 1% of the cost NASA formulas  
predicted...

   It has 1980's era
 interfaces, functionality, and problems.  Most of these problems are
 well known.  Many are even well solved in other tools.

I don't consider extremely expensive, complex tools that cater to the  
needs of institutions to create inefficient divisions of labor to be  
a good model.

 Please, set your sights higher,

Set your sights higher. Don't feed the trend to overspecialization  
and low productivity.

 fast-forward 2 or 3 decades, go see what
 the other guys do, and try to produce a tool that actually *is*  
 excellent.


We have different metrics for excellence. There is room for that. But  
again, I'm extremely grateful for a tool that bucks the trend here.  
On one very large project I'm working on (partly in gEDA), I'm told  
I'm the only contractor who is on schedule. Now if they'd just get  
the contract situation straightened out so I can get paid (grumble)...

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-12 Thread John Griessen

DJ Delorie wrote:
 Just think how awesome gEDA would be if the amount of effort y'all
 put into writing code was equal to the amount of energy you're
 putting into this ultimately futile flamewar.
 
 When dealing with human factors issues, a lot of energy *needs* to be
 spent up front figuring out what the problems are.  You can't code
 your way out of a misunderstanding about what the user wants.

I'm so glad to hear that from one of our core developers!  Keeps me working on
affording time to contribute...because that time won't be wasted by 
misunderstandings
and lack of collaboration.

John Griessen


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-11 Thread John Doty


On Aug 10, 2009, at 7:27 PM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:

 On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:57:37 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 This is not conversion, but a work flow partially in geda,  
 partially in
 some other suite. As nice as it is,

 Name another tool that can do this as easily and flexibly as gEDA.

 emacs

Well, you can compose your netlists in emacs if you want. I'll keep  
using gnetlist ;-)



 If we take gEDA's strengths for granted, we will lose them.

 Its hard to stay on topic, is it?

Understand that this is precisely the topic to me. I don't believe,  
Kai-Martin, that you appreciate what a powerful tool Ales has given us.


 it does not make the switch to and
 from geda any easier. The missing feature is the ability to  
 import and
 export symbols, schematics, footprints and layouts to and from other
 suites.

 So we need even greater flexibility. Less hard-wired, fewer  
 barriers to
 arbitrary transformations.

 No, we need import and export mechanisms that work. Right now,  
 there is
 none. Lack of features is the opposite of flexibility.

Wrong. Ever use the language PL/I? Loaded with every feature the best  
computer scientists IBM could find asked for. Touted as the universal  
language. Displaced by the much simpler C language (to the extent  
that a universal language makes sense). I'm an old PL/I programmer  
(learned it 40 years ago, yikes). Believe me, C is much more flexible  
and easy to use. All those features just got in the way.

Ever use the Viewlogic EDA suite? I have. gEDA is very similar, but  
has many fewer features. Hurray! Again, that makes gEDA more flexible  
and easier to use, especially if your needs are a bit eccentric. And  
in the Viewlogic case, lots of features led to lots of bugs.



In the case of export, the basic problem is that the features are in  
the wrong place. The gnetlist front end provides hard wired features  
that instead belong in the convenience functions in gnetlist.scm. If  
the front end stuck to parsing files on request from the back end and/ 
or the convenience functions, the back end could see all of the data  
if it needed, and transformations to formats other than flat netlists  
and BOM's would be possible.

Import is a different problem. Parsing a complex input format is  
trickier than outputting it, especially when it's undocumented.  
There's probably no general framework that makes sense here: it'll  
require separate tools. In a sense, it's like those gnetlist back  
ends: the tools will mainly be written by those who want to do the  
importing. But it's an order of magnitude harder. My old Viewlogic  
schematics aren't relevant enough to today's jobs to make it  
worthwhile for me to tackle this.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-11 Thread spuzzdawg


   I think that this is basically an argument in usability vs
   flexibility. John is basically arguing that gEDA's lack of
   restrictions means that it can be used for a multitude of tasks. A
   person's workflow can be developed to the user's taste rather than
   through wrestling against the program.
   On the other hand, Kai is arguing that you need to be a gEDA expert,
   understand the intricacies of backends and front ends to accomplish
   even the simplest task.
   My opinion is that to a certain extent, both approaches are correct.
   If I'm designing a circuit board I want to be able to click on a
   component and add it in to my schematic and then flip to pcb view and
   put it on the board with some tracks. With gEDA I need to understand
   symbol properties to assign a footprint. I need to know about M4
   footprints vs the newer style. The only way to find out the correct
   footprint name to use is too look through the footprint files in a
   folder that changes depending on the method of install. If the
   footprint doesn't exist I need to create it using a cryptic language.
   Some basic functions, like moving a component to an absolute location,
   only have a command line action with no gui counterpart. Users then
   have to email the mailing list to find out what all the hidden
   functionality is because the documentation exists but is very hard to
   find and decipher.
   Sure gEDA is more flexible than other programs, but this flexibility
   is really a hinderence to my workflow and I'm sure others are turned
   away for similar reasons.
   Nick


 So we need even greater flexibility. Less hard-wired, fewer  
 barriers to
 arbitrary transformations.

 No, we need import and export mechanisms that work. Right now,  
 there is
 none. Lack of features is the opposite of flexibility.

Wrong. Ever use the language PL/I? Loaded with every feature the best  
computer scientists IBM could find asked for. Touted as the universal  
language. Displaced by the much simpler C language (to the extent  
that a universal language makes sense). I'm an old PL/I programmer  
(learned it 40 years ago, yikes). Believe me, C is much more flexible  
and easy to use. All those features just got in the way.

Ever use the Viewlogic EDA suite? I have. gEDA is very similar, but  
has many fewer features. Hurray! Again, that makes gEDA more flexible  
and easier to use, especially if your needs are a bit eccentric. And  
in the Viewlogic case, lots of features led to lots of bugs.



In the case of export, the basic problem is that the features are in  
the wrong place. The gnetlist front end provides hard wired features  
that instead belong in the convenience functions in gnetlist.scm. If  
the front end stuck to parsing files on request from the back end and/ 
or the convenience functions, the back end could see all of the data  
if it needed, and transformations to formats other than flat netlists  
and BOM's would be possible.

Import is a different problem. Parsing a complex input format is  
trickier than outputting it, especially when it's undocumented.  
There's probably no general framework that makes sense here: it'll  
require separate tools. In a sense, it's like those gnetlist back  
ends: the tools will mainly be written by those who want to do the  
importing. But it's an order of magnitude harder. My old Viewlogic  
schematics aren't relevant enough to today's jobs to make it  
worthwhile for me to tackle this.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
[1]http://www.noqsi.com/
[2]...@noqsi.com

References

   1. http://www.noqsi.com/
   2. mailto:j...@noqsi.com


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-11 Thread DJ Delorie


 I think that this is basically an argument in usability vs flexibility.

Hmm...  I don't think those are exclusive.

gEDA provides flexibility.  This allows for multiple workflows.  Power
users can use this flexibility to custom tailor their workflow.  Fine,
so far.  However, not everyone is a power user.

So, we must provide some default workflows for the beginners.  Is gEDA
powerful enough and flexible enough to provide a seamless easy-to-use
workflow for beginners while also offering a full expansion option to
power users?  Is it powerful enough to provide all the newbie
functionality in an obvious-to-use interface?  Easy to use does not
mean simple, it means well presented.

But the original argument wasn't one of usability.

We discussed this on IRC for a while, and I had a personal revelation:

  The windows problem isn't about making gEDA easy to *USE*.  It's
  about making gEDA easy to *TRY*.

Currently, no matter how much better we think gEDA is - beginner or
power user - there's a hurdle to getting it installed on Windows.
People just won't try it because it's too much effort for an unknown
benefit.  Think of it as a hysteresis - the user must put some work
into just getting it to the point where they can decide if it's worth
learning.  We must lower this requirement so that those who would
benefit from gEDA - even as it is - will take the opportunity.

So, can we ignore the flexible vs easy argument for now?  I think
it's much more important to get the intermediate step first - giving
people an easier solution to *trying* gEDA to see if it fits their
needs.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-11 Thread Josh Jordan


   Right on.  Lack of a footprint browser was a huge turnoff when I first
   started using geda.  In fact, it compelled me stick with eagle for
   longer.  As for moving objects to an absolute location, two simple
   things need to be done.  Moveobject() only moves 1 object at a time it
   does not operate on all selected.  This could be changed by adding a
   Moveselected() function or adding another arg to moveobject() for
   instance moveobject(selected, +200, -200, mil).   It would also be
   simple to put that in the gui somewhere.
   I don't know about a footprint browser, that is not as simple.  I use
   grep on the command line to find them.  I was not finding footprints
   easily and i was rewriting footprints that already existed before I
   figured out how to search for them.  It seems like common sense now to
   use grep but when I first switched to linux I knew nothing about
   grep.  We could do a folder view of footprints with an entry box for
   grep patterns.  This is a challenge if it has to be OS-independant.
   --- On Tue, 8/11/09, spuzzdawg spuzzd...@spuzzdawg.net wrote:

   I need to know about M4
  footprints vs the newer style. The only way to find out the correct
  footprint name to use is too look through the footprint files in a
  folder that changes depending on the method of install. If the
  footprint doesn't exist I need to create it using a cryptic
   language.
  Some basic functions, like moving a component to an absolute
   location,
  only have a command line action with no gui counterpart. Users then
  have to email the mailing list to find out what all the hidden
  functionality is because the documentation exists but is very hard
   to
  find and decipher.

   __
   Do You Yahoo!?
   Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
   http://mail.yahoo.com


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-11 Thread Bill Gatliff

spuzzdawg wrote:
I think that this is basically an argument in usability vs
flexibility.

One person's flexibility hinders another's usability.  :)

I think what's abundantly clear by this whole discussion is that there's
a grave need for a recommended, introductory-level workflow--- and
enough glue to make that workflow as simple as possible for a new user.

A new user probably doesn't care initially about the gobs of cool stuff
gEDA can potentially do, I bet they just want to get from schematic
capture to fabricated board with as little effort as possible.  Once
they've completed that cycle once, if the experience is pleasant then
they'll be motivated to try some of the more sophisticated workflows
that gEDA's flexibility makes possible--- even if that means a higher
investment in effort.  If the initial experience is unpleasant, they
won't come back and all that flexibility is wasted on them.

I came to gEDA with no experience whatsoever, other than doing schematic
captures with pencil and paper, and fabrication on a solderless
breadboard.  I'm three or four designs in now, but getting to where I
was even competent with the tools hasn't been easy--- my first board run
cost me $500 due to a footprint screwup that forced me to toss the whole
lot in the bin.  I don't like having to demand that level of effort from
the new users that I recommend the tools to.

A tool as powerful and important as gEDA needs an active user and
contributor base, which is something I don't see reflected in the
geda-user mailing list activity: the same few names come up over and
over again.  That's a bad sign.  We can't grow a user base if we can't
create a pleasant out-of-the-box experience that keeps the first-timers
around for a second, third and successive designs.  Even if their
designs aren't substantial, and even if they don't require all the power
that gEDA has to offer, we have to make sure that their efforts have a
high probability of success if we're to keep them around to learn about
all the better ways that gEDA can solve their problems.

For the record, I don't think gEDA is *that* hard to use.  By far the
biggest obstacle to me to date has been a lack of clear direction on and
support for an introductory-level workflow: a basic set of pre-existing
symbols and footprints for some common parts, and end-to-end guidance on
how to use them to get through to something you can submit to a board
house.  (In fact, it took me a while to even figure out HOW to submit to
a board house).  As it is now, most of my symbol and footprint library
is basically junk because I totally didn't get the idea from the
beginning about the kinds of information I need in my symbols vs. what I
thought I needed.  I'm not talking about a heavy-vs.-light debate, I'm
talking about if you are going to do a heavy symbol, then do it like
this

I think the root of the Slashdot article poster's problem is gEDA's
out-of-box experience, but we've let that discussion (de)evolve into the
relative merits of flexibility vs. usability.  I think we should go back
to defining tasks that would improve the out-of-box experience without
necessarily breaking gEDA's flexibility in situations where more than
documentation is required to address the issue.  Once we've worked down
that list, we can decide at that point if the time we get back is best
spent on abstract discussions or more tasks.  :)



b.g.

-- 
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b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-11 Thread Bill Gatliff

DJ Delorie wrote:
 So, can we ignore the flexible vs easy argument for now?  I think
 it's much more important to get the intermediate step first - giving
 people an easier solution to *trying* gEDA to see if it fits their
 needs.
   

Honest, I didn't read this post before writing one of my own that says
the exact same thing.

I don't know whether that's a good sign, or not.  Perhaps it's for the
best that DJ doesn't know me at all, so he can't decide whether it's a
good thing or not that we think alike about something.  :)


b.g.

-- 
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b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-10 Thread Josh Jordan


   Make is a great tool and it is disappointing that CS departments
   ignore it.  They use gcc and give you the compile command and never
   teach make!  If students knew make then they could use toolkits
   instead of fritterware.

   The tools that do what you want are fritterware that doesn't scale
   well. While with gEDA I can check a project out from CVS, type
   something like make ChainTest.out, have all the subcircuit netlists
   and stimulus files built, data reduction programs compiled, SPICE
   run, data reduced, output generated...
   Now *that's* how you eliminate *real* tedious, productivity-sapping
   procedure. I don't even remember how all these machinations work, but
   I can read the Makefiles if I need to know.
   
   
The other common complaint that comes
from that direction is that gEDA is a toolkit, not an integrated
   tool
(but I say Hurray!).
   
Carthaginem esse delendam?
   Got the job done, didn't it? Does every EDA tool have to turn into
   fritterware for the computer illiterate? I'm grateful there's one
   that hasn't.
   John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
   [1]http://www.noqsi.com/
   [2]...@noqsi.com
   ___
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References

   1. http://www.noqsi.com/
   2. file://localhost/mc/compose?to=...@noqsi.com
   3. file://localhost/mc/compose?to=geda-u...@moria.seul.org
   4. http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-10 Thread Kai-Martin Knaak

On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:57:37 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 This is not conversion, but a work flow partially in geda, partially in
 some other suite. As nice as it is,
 
 Name another tool that can do this as easily and flexibly as gEDA.

emacs

 
 If we take gEDA's strengths for granted, we will lose them.

Its hard to stay on topic, is it?
 
 it does not make the switch to and
 from geda any easier. The missing feature is the ability to import and
 export symbols, schematics, footprints and layouts to and from other
 suites.
 
 So we need even greater flexibility. Less hard-wired, fewer barriers to
 arbitrary transformations.

No, we need import and export mechanisms that work. Right now, there is 
none. Lack of features is the opposite of flexibility.

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread al davis

On Saturday 01 August 2009, Bob Paddock wrote:
 http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/2114210/Cheap-Cross-P
latform-Electronic-Circuit-Simulation-Software?from=rss

 Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation
 Software?

 dv82 writes I teach circuits and electronics at the
 undergraduate level, and have been using the free student
 demo version of OrCad for schematic capture and simulation
 because (a) it comes with the textbook and (b) it's powerful
 enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad runs only under
 Windows, and students increasingly are switching to Mac (and
 some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run
 OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase
 Windows and run with a VM. The only production-quality
 cross-platform CAD tool I have found so far is McCad, but its
 demo version is so limited in total allowed nets that it
 can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a realistic 741
 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and
 is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to
 be able to run the software on their laptops without a
 network connection, which eliminates more options. Any
 suggestions?

I was out of town when this hit (which was probably fortunate).

What are we going to do about it?

If we want people to use our tools ..

1. They need to be the best.

2. We need to provide a migration path -- in and out.


Gnucap works fine, but there is a problem with the geda 
interface.  Does anyone want to help?



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 9, 2009, at 9:56 AM, al davis wrote:

 On Saturday 01 August 2009, Bob Paddock wrote:
 http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/2114210/Cheap-Cross-P
 latform-Electronic-Circuit-Simulation-Software?from=rss

 Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation
 Software?

 dv82 writes I teach circuits and electronics at the
 undergraduate level, and have been using the free student
 demo version of OrCad for schematic capture and simulation
 because (a) it comes with the textbook and (b) it's powerful
 enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad runs only under
 Windows, and students increasingly are switching to Mac (and
 some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run
 OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase
 Windows and run with a VM. The only production-quality
 cross-platform CAD tool I have found so far is McCad, but its
 demo version is so limited in total allowed nets that it
 can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a realistic 741
 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and
 is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to
 be able to run the software on their laptops without a
 network connection, which eliminates more options. Any
 suggestions?

 I was out of town when this hit (which was probably fortunate).

 What are we going to do about it?

 If we want people to use our tools ..

 1. They need to be the best.

 2. We need to provide a migration path -- in and out.


 Gnucap works fine, but there is a problem with the geda
 interface.  Does anyone want to help?

What's the problem you perceive? The author seems primarily concerned  
with the lack of a Windows binary. The other common complaint that  
comes from that direction is that gEDA is a toolkit, not an  
integrated tool (but I say Hurray!).




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http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Peter TB Brett

On Sun, 9 Aug 2009 11:56:22 -0400, al davis ad...@freeelectron.net wrote:

 [snip]

 gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows,

 [snip]
 
 I was out of town when this hit (which was probably fortunate).
 
 What are we going to do about it?

 [snip]

 ... there is a problem with the geda 
 interface.  Does anyone want to help?

Let's be more specific.

Does anyone want to help getting a Windows port working (reasonably)
smoothly?  Has anyone tested a Windows build recently?

Peter

-- 
Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Gareth Edwards

2009/8/9 Peter TB Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk:

 Does anyone want to help getting a Windows port working (reasonably)
 smoothly?  Has anyone tested a Windows build recently?

I could pitch in on that. Good place to start?

Cheers
Gareth


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Kai-Martin Knaak

On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:01:30 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 2. We need to provide a migration path -- in and out.


 Gnucap works fine, but there is a problem with the geda interface. 
 Does anyone want to help?
 
 What's the problem you perceive? 

The most obvious obstacle in the migration path is the lack of conversion 
tools. There is no way to go to and from other EDA suites that play in 
the same league (eagle, kicad, protel98).

In the context of the slashdot article: Gschem does not interface very 
well with gnucap. There is no student-proof to just simulate a section of 
a schematic. Instead, it takes a rather tedious procedure just to get the 
response of a LC filter.


 The other common complaint that comes
 from that direction is that gEDA is a toolkit, not an integrated tool
 (but I say Hurray!).

Carthaginem esse delendam?

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Peter TB Brett

On Sun, 9 Aug 2009 17:17:17 +0100, Gareth Edwards
gar...@edwardsfamily.org.uk wrote:
 2009/8/9 Peter TB Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk:

 Does anyone want to help getting a Windows port working (reasonably)
 smoothly?  Has anyone tested a Windows build recently?
 
 I could pitch in on that. Good place to start?

If I remember correctly... *searches mail archives*

http://www.geda.seul.org/mailinglist/geda-dev126/msg00029.html

That's probably a good place to start.

I suggest the following algorithm:

1. Try something.

2. If it doesn't work, Google for a solution

3. If Google doesn't have answers, ask the list.

4. If the list doesn't have answers, file a bug and wait for someone to fix
it or find a workaround.

5. Goto 1.

Cheers,

Peter ;-)

( who knows literally nothing about building GTK apps on Windows)


-- 
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Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread DJ Delorie


 Does anyone want to help getting a Windows port working (reasonably)
 smoothly?

I would.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Gareth Edwards

2009/8/9 Peter TB Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk:

 If I remember correctly... *searches mail archives*

 http://www.geda.seul.org/mailinglist/geda-dev126/msg00029.html

 That's probably a good place to start.


OK, I'll have a play.

Cheers
Gareth


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 9, 2009, at 11:09 AM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:

 On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:01:30 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 2. We need to provide a migration path -- in and out.


 Gnucap works fine, but there is a problem with the geda interface.
 Does anyone want to help?

 What's the problem you perceive?

 The most obvious obstacle in the migration path is the lack of  
 conversion
 tools.

With the exception of the flow from gschem to layout in another  
suite, which works radically well. How to generalize? Well, if you  
want to export schematics instead of just netlists and BOM's, a  
gnetlist back end needs access to all the schematic data, not just a  
subset. The barrier here is all of the unnecessarily hard-wired  
behavior in the gnetlist front end.

I'd still like to collaborate with you here: you seem to have  
penetrated the front end logic, while the back end is much simpler.  
Let's start to refactor gnetlist to make it even more flexible.

 There is no way to go to and from other EDA suites that play in
 the same league (eagle, kicad, protel98).

Foreign schematic to gEDA schematic requires either some new  
framework or a collection of individual tools. However, you can merge  
in a foreign netlist by parsing it, outputting a .tsv version, and  
using pins2gsch.


 In the context of the slashdot article: Gschem does not interface very
 well with gnucap. There is no student-proof to just simulate a  
 section of
 a schematic. Instead, it takes a rather tedious procedure just to  
 get the
 response of a LC filter.

The tools that do what you want are fritterware that doesn't scale  
well. While with gEDA I can check a project out from CVS, type  
something like make ChainTest.out, have all the subcircuit netlists  
and stimulus files built, data reduction programs compiled, SPICE  
run, data reduced, output generated...

Now *that's* how you eliminate *real* tedious, productivity-sapping  
procedure. I don't even remember how all these machinations work, but  
I can read the Makefiles if I need to know.



 The other common complaint that comes
 from that direction is that gEDA is a toolkit, not an integrated tool
 (but I say Hurray!).

 Carthaginem esse delendam?

Got the job done, didn't it? Does every EDA tool have to turn into  
fritterware for the computer illiterate? I'm grateful there's one  
that hasn't.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Peter TB Brett

On Sun, 9 Aug 2009 12:09:01 -0600, John Doty j...@noqsi.com wrote:

 With the exception of the flow from gschem to layout in another  
 suite, which works radically well. How to generalize? Well, if you  
 want to export schematics instead of just netlists and BOM's, a  
 gnetlist back end needs access to all the schematic data, not just a  
 subset. The barrier here is all of the unnecessarily hard-wired  
 behavior in the gnetlist front end.

One project I've had in mind for a while is to write a geda-netlist
program in (almost) pure Scheme, which when run as gnetlist behaves the
same as the current C gnetlist, but when run as geda-netlist uses new
backends which have a lot more access to the netlist internals in order to
get full control over the way that the schematics and symbols are
processed.

This is one of those things that I will do Soon (tm).

Peter ;-)

-- 
Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 9, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Peter TB Brett wrote:

 On Sun, 9 Aug 2009 12:09:01 -0600, John Doty j...@noqsi.com wrote:

 With the exception of the flow from gschem to layout in another
 suite, which works radically well. How to generalize? Well, if you
 want to export schematics instead of just netlists and BOM's, a
 gnetlist back end needs access to all the schematic data, not just a
 subset. The barrier here is all of the unnecessarily hard-wired
 behavior in the gnetlist front end.

 One project I've had in mind for a while is to write a geda-netlist
 program in (almost) pure Scheme,

Would you parse the schems/symbols with libgeda?

 which when run as gnetlist behaves the
 same as the current C gnetlist, but when run as geda-netlist

Not clear to me that you need that. Backends that limit themselves to  
the old API could get the old behavior.

 uses new
 backends which have a lot more access to the netlist internals in  
 order to
 get full control over the way that the schematics and symbols are
 processed.

The longer I think about this, the more useful applications I see.


 This is one of those things that I will do Soon (tm).

If you want help...


 Peter ;-)

 -- 
 Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk
 Remote Sensing Research Group
 Surrey Space Centre


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http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Kai-Martin Knaak

On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:45:34 +0100, Peter TB Brett wrote:

 One project I've had in mind for a while is to write a geda-netlist

And thus increment the number of netlisters associated with the geda 
project by one ;-)

How will you make sure, that the new netlister exactly replicates the old 
behavior? Does this include the areas with room for improvement? Is 
there some comprehensive white-paper that specifies how gnetlist should 
behave when given arbitrary, syntactical valid *.sch data?


 program in (almost) pure Scheme,

What is the share of users/developers that feel comfortable with scheme?
Probably, the choice of programming language is less an issue than the 
quantity and quality of documentation.

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-09 Thread Kai-Martin Knaak

On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:09:01 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 The most obvious obstacle in the migration path is the lack of
 conversion
 tools.
 
 With the exception of the flow from gschem to layout in another suite,
 which works radically well.

This is not conversion, but a work flow partially in geda, partially in 
some other suite. As nice as it is, it does not make the switch to and 
from geda any easier. The missing feature is the ability to import and 
export symbols, schematics, footprints and layouts to and from other 
suites. 

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 9, 2009, at 3:37 PM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:

 On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:09:01 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 The most obvious obstacle in the migration path is the lack of
 conversion
 tools.

 With the exception of the flow from gschem to layout in another  
 suite,
 which works radically well.

 This is not conversion, but a work flow partially in geda,  
 partially in
 some other suite. As nice as it is,

Name another tool that can do this as easily and flexibly as gEDA.

If we take gEDA's strengths for granted, we will lose them.

 it does not make the switch to and
 from geda any easier. The missing feature is the ability to import and
 export symbols, schematics, footprints and layouts to and from other
 suites.

So we need even greater flexibility. Less hard-wired, fewer barriers  
to arbitrary transformations.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

2009-08-03 Thread Bert Timmerman

Hi Tibor and all,

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 07:11 +0200, igor2 wrote:
 On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote:
 
 You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now.
 Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind?
 
 For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very
 first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't
 work out as good as I expected. Reasons for this, in my opinion, are
 little issues: some seemingly unimportant convention of windows that
 windows users are so got used to that they do not want to switch to
 anything else, even if what they are currently using is the worst possible
 way of doing that thing. Some examples (and possible solutions):
 
 - window manager; there are ways to make the live cd run a very similar
 window manager that windows has, but it will never be the same. Any little
 difference will annoy windows users.
 
 - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands
 or you see a prompt, that's the sign you are doing something wrong. On
 this, xgsch2pcb helped a lot but...
 
 - ... but these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg,
 this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this? Really, this
 was one of the big surprises for my students, that doing different tasks
 can be best achieved by using different tools. And this is not even about
 hjaving back annotation, it's purely about having everything in one big
 window. I am rather sure if anyone would come up with a tool that
 integrates xgsch2pcb, gschem and pcb into a single window with tabs,
 these users won't ever notice they are separate programs even if mouse
 commands are different in each window.
 
...
more stuff deleted here

Here is my EUR 0.02 on the subject:

I think Fritzing is a better suited app for the undergrad windoze
peoples.
With Fritzing they can have a schematic, breadboard and final proto pcb,
all in one window with tabs, using combined parts, containing symbol,
footprint and breadboard part artwork.
Add a toporouter for the pcb part and you have outdone most of the
competition.
The concept is very appealing, maybe someday a gFritzing port will be
made :)

OTOH, It is a single type of workflow, no simulation or deviation
possible.

Kind regards,

Bert Timmerman.



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-03 Thread Joerg

John Doty wrote:
 On Aug 2, 2009, at 7:45 AM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
 
 On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:42:20 -0600, John Doty wrote:


[...]


 That's
 our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is a  
 sharp
 toolkit for the computer-savvy.
 It is remarkably blunt in certain aspects. Aspects, that are very
 relevant to EDA. Lack of backannotation
 
 Is there any tool that *really* does backannotation well? I used a  
 commercial one where the backannotation wasted more time than just  
 doing the job by hand. ...


Just to comment on this one subject, Cadsoft Eagle does. Disclaimer: I 
am in no way an expert on this as I farm out layouts (except for nasty 
RF areas). But when I tried back annotation on Eagle it did work nicely. 
You have to have both schematic and layout loaded at the same time 
though and you must use the Board/Schematic button to switch between 
the two.

The only gripe I have with Eagle is that it doesn't offer a hierarchy. 
That's a huge deficiency.

It has been too long ago that I used OrCad but when using their layout 
SW it did backanno nicely, AFAIR. It could also take in cross refdes 
lists and do it for layouts performed on other systems. But: OrCad 
crashed on me too often for my taste and IIRC the layout package of the 
program has been discontinued. Still, OrCad is being used by the 
majority of my clients.

-- 
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

2009-08-03 Thread Joerg

Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
 On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:30:54 -0400, evan foss wrote:
 
 If people really wanted a windows one then where are they?
 
 In the kicad user group? Hanging out in eagle.support.eng?
  

Yes and yes :-)


 Note, that the vast majority of users don't demand better software. They 
 just take, what is there. If it doesn't fit their needs, they use 
 something else.
 

Exactamente. For most folks CAD is only a tool, just like the table saw, 
the planer and the drill press are for them when they do wood working on 
Saturdays. Whether we like it or not, that's the way most engineers 
think about this.

WRT to simulation my impression is that this field has basically been 
taken over by LTSpice, for circuit level designers almost completely.

-- 
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

gmail domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-03 Thread Gene Heskett

On Monday 03 August 2009, John Doty wrote:
On Aug 2, 2009, at 5:20 PM, Bill Gatliff wrote:
 One of the ways that the gdb guys cracked this nut was to push a
 lot of
 their functionality into libraries, and create an HID-centric API for
 them.  They include a command-line-interface implementation by
 default,
 but then others can take those same libraries and build their own GUIs
 around them.  And drag in libraries from other places to add
 functionality that gdb doesn't itself provide.  So now Eclipse, DDD,
 Insight, and many other frontends can all use the same gdb backend
 rather than inventing their own.  Everybody wins.

For one of my space missions, we had a company write much of the
software. They were really big on IDE's with interactive debugging.
But there was part of the system that was buried in a way that made
it inaccessible to the interactive debugger. They complained bitterly
about this, but there was no practical alternative.

But when it came to do the work, the guy who had to suffer without
the interactive debugger was consistently ahead of schedule, and
produced software that was nearly bug free. The other programmers
were chronically behind, and their software was infested with serious
bugs.

I visited their shop, and what I saw was disturbing: programmers
stepping through buggy code hour after hour. But the guy who couldn't
do that had a much higher productivity flow: unit tests, defensive
coding, etc. took more thought up front, but they saved time in the end.

The term fritterware comes to mind. Fritterware is easy to get
started with, comfortable, addictive, and ineffective at doing the
job (although not ineffective enough that its users notice). It sells
well, and its users believe its bad characteristics to be essential.

Interactive debuggers like gdb are fritterware. In ordinary
environments, gdb's only genuinely useful command is bt. In
embedded environments there are a few more. But all the massive
complexity of stepping, breakpoints, etc. is pure fritter,
suppressing thought and wasting time.

Putting a GUI atop something that's already fritterware is harmless.
Putting a GUI atop a graphical application is a good thing. Putting a
GUI atop a complex, poorly factored (or intrinsically unfactorable)
tool can help the user navigate the mess. But one should strive for
an effective, cleanly factored toolkit that doesn't need a GUI except
where real time interaction with the user is unavoidable.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com

Pay attention to John, he _does_ know what he is talking about, I too have 
been that 'crippled' programmer.  The only debugging tool worth anything on 
that platform was a register dumper that you could put a call to anyplace in 
your code.  I was working on a swiss army knife sort of a file utility for 
that os, and when I was finished, and those calls removed and the code re-
assembled, I posted the final version about an hour later.  A decade plus 
later, that code is still being shipped.  The only bug possible is PEBKAC  
even that is difficult to do.  In that same decade  change, I have yet to 
have anyone contact me about it not doing what it was supposed to do.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them.
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 1, 2009, at 7:55 PM, DJ Delorie wrote:


 Anyone to stand up and bash the poster of the topic for his
 judgement?

 His judgement is pretty much dead on.  Many people on this list are
 openly hostile to Windows users,

The only hostility I see is to the attitude: I want a Windows binary  
but I don't know how to build one, so you *nix guys should do it for  
me for free.

 and we certainly haven't gone through
 the effort to make our software install and run smoothly on Windows.

We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're  
a bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.  
That's our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is  
a sharp toolkit for the computer-savvy.

 What ports we do have are rough around the edges and not as easy to
 use (gui-wise) as 99% of the windows software on the planet.

I wouldn't call Word easy to use. An extremely dull tool. But the  
nice thing about free software is that we can clone the dull tool as  
OpenOffice while keeping sharp tools like TeX around. I very much  
hope that gEDA does not evolve into a dull tool.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:42:20 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 His judgement is pretty much dead on.  Many people on this list are
 openly hostile to Windows users,
 
 The only hostility I see is to the attitude:

Yet, the rest of your post is a perfect example for general windows 
hostility.


 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're a
 bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use. That's
 our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is a sharp
 toolkit for the computer-savvy.

It is remarkably blunt in certain aspects. Aspects, that are very 
relevant to EDA. Lack of backannotation and a more than stony interaction 
with simulation tools are just two of them.


 I wouldn't call Word easy to use. An extremely dull tool.

No hostility here, nah...


 But the nice thing about free software is that we can clone the 
 dull tool as OpenOffice

Note, that ooffice wasn't free at all when conceived as staroffice. 
Giving it away for free was a last resort  marketing move to save the 
project from oblivion.


 I very much hope that gEDA does not evolve into a dull tool.

I very much hope, evolution into a better EDA tool is not blocked by 
dogmatism.

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Bob Paddock wrote:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/2114210/Cheap-Cross-Platform-Electronic-Circuit-Simulation-Software?from=rss

Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation Software?

dv82 writes I teach circuits and electronics at the undergraduate
level, and have been using the free student demo version of OrCad for
schematic capture and simulation because (a) it comes with the
textbook and (b) it's powerful enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad
runs only under Windows, and students increasingly are switching to
Mac (and some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run
OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase Windows and
run with a VM. The only production-quality cross-platform CAD tool I
have found so far is McCad, but its demo version is so limited in
total allowed nets that it can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a
realistic 741 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows,
and is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to be
able to run the software on their laptops without a network
connection, which eliminates more options. Any suggestions?

well, quite frankly if this is a sort of intro to electronics class
with a first view of simulation, I think he should just be using a
simulator and skip the schematic capture. Knowing how to work with
netlists is pretty darn valuable even if you primarily use schematic
capture or even synthesis tools down the road. It's not a matter of if,
it is a matter of when you end up needing to look at the netlist to
understand what the tools have done to you.

Its not as if the netlists involved with these types of courses are
terribly large.

The other option is if things are getting large to the point of it
really honestly being counter productive to just use a netlist, then
windows users do have the gschem under cygwin option.

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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

igor2 wrote:

 Conclusion: I think a pure live CD won't help much. Something that
 integrates better in the windows environment, and where integration is
 not possible, something that looks and acts exactly the same way (even if
 that's stupid and slow) is necessary to convience majority of windows
 users to even consider gEDA.

 My personal opinion is that different software should do different
 things. Having 10 different cads looking exactly the same, doing exactly
 the same things is not very useful. I think gEDA's place is not on the
 windows desktop, doesn't matter how hard we push, it's not a windows
 application. 

Oh, I can see having gEDA components window integrated to get more users
involved and further open tools without losing the toolkit functions
of the components.  It just takes some consistent vision on the core 
requirements.

John Griessen
-- 
Ecosensory   Austin TX


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Josh Jordan wrote:
What a doofus.  You can get any free-trial/limited 

 key sentence:

 gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and is nowhere near as
 refined as OrCad.

Why call the original poster of this thread a doofus for wanting
his students to go beyond limits with a tool they can use indefinitely?
Such methods allow free hardware, and student-powered-free-hardware
is a real boon if you ask me.

The gEDA tools are getting close to being useful even to a grade
conscious, hurried grad student aimed at a corporate job.  I noticed
an article we should all read about the Orcad developers and their user 
interface,
and it wouldn't hurt if we all ran a limited Orcad version so we could
see it in action.  
http://www.edn.com/article/CA236.html?text=improving+on+pcb+design

But when it gets down to really making a difference in the world a
classroom exercise followed by never affording your own tools and
only developing circuits or products for your employing
corporation is not enough.

John Griessen

-- 
Ecosensory   Austin TX


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-02 Thread Bob Paddock

  I noticed
 an article we should all read about the Orcad developers and their user 
 interface,
 and it wouldn't hurt if we all ran a limited Orcad version so we could
 see it in action.  
 http://www.edn.com/article/CA236.html?text=improving+on+pcb+design

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OldDosOrcad/
might have a version that can be downloaded.
Alas you have to join the group to find out.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 2, 2009, at 7:45 AM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:

 On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:42:20 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 His judgement is pretty much dead on.  Many people on this list are
 openly hostile to Windows users,

 The only hostility I see is to the attitude:

 Yet, the rest of your post is a perfect example for general windows
 hostility.

Huh? It's not hostility to Windows, it's hostility to an approach to  
software that isn't at all unique to Windows. Windows is a latecomer  
to that approach. And, in fact, Windows doesn't force that approach  
on the user. The barriers are in the users' minds, not in the system.  
And that isn't unique to Windows, either.

Here, the big difference here between Windows users and Mac users is  
one person: Charles Lepple, who packages gEDA for MacOSX (hurray for  
Charles!). So, there are no complaints that gEDA is unfriendly to Mac  
users. That's all it takes.

The integrated GUI approach has its uses: I'm typing this in Apple  
Mail. But for less trivial jobs, it forces the user onto a low  
productivity track.

I'm hostile to bicycles with training wheels permanently attached.



 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants.  
 We're a
 bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.  
 That's
 our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is a  
 sharp
 toolkit for the computer-savvy.

 It is remarkably blunt in certain aspects. Aspects, that are very
 relevant to EDA. Lack of backannotation

Is there any tool that *really* does backannotation well? I used a  
commercial one where the backannotation wasted more time than just  
doing the job by hand. I've heard similar complaints from others. But  
it's something we can work on. Dan's .eco file suggestion is a good  
one, because it could come from anywhere. My pins2gsch script is an  
effective backannotion tool when you don't need graphical  
connections. Dan's .eco file suggestion is a good one, because it  
could come from anywhere. For non-hierarchical schematics, attribute  
backannotation looks pretty simple. But this is another place I wish  
gnetlist was more transparent: if the back end could see the  
hierarchy, making a map that would help a backannotation script find  
the attributes would be trivial.

But I probably wouldn't use full backannotion in my flows anyway.  
Keep the source files clean, transform them into intermediates as  
needed. Good tools could do it either way.

 and a more than stony interaction
 with simulation tools are just two of them.

One problem is that the simulation tools don't play so nice. gEDA's  
advantage, though, is that it can work with any one of them.

Sounds like you want a schematic plug-in to gnucap. And then you'll  
want a schematic plug-in to PCB. Those wouldn't be bad things,  
especially if they used .sch format for the files. But let's keep  
gEDA's modular, flexible kit modular and flexible (there's even room  
for improvement here). A schematic plugin to bin/* is not the answer.



 I wouldn't call Word easy to use. An extremely dull tool.

 No hostility here, nah...

Again, that applies equally well to OpenOffice. Nothing specifically  
to do with Windows. It's that you point and click all day to get  
something, when you should be letting the computer do most of the work.

The first computer I ever used was an IBM 1130 with the customary  
THINK sign atop the console. Think about what you want the computer  
to do, tell it how, and then let it do it. An old-fashioned idea, but  
still very effective.



 But the nice thing about free software is that we can clone the
 dull tool as OpenOffice

 Note, that ooffice wasn't free at all when conceived as staroffice.
 Giving it away for free was a last resort  marketing move to save the
 project from oblivion.

OK, how about Abiword? Or the KDE thing, whatever it's called.



 I very much hope that gEDA does not evolve into a dull tool.

 I very much hope, evolution into a better EDA tool is not blocked by
 dogmatism.

What you consider better, I, in many cases, consider worse.  
Inflexible, low productivity. There are plenty of dull EDA tools out  
there: why not just use of them them instead of dumbing gEDA down?

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Bob Paddock wrote:

 http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OldDosOrcad/
 might have a version that can be downloaded.

http://www.edn.com/contents/images/236.pdf

is a pdf of the article, Improving on
PCB design, I think any current or prospective
gEDA developers should read about OrCad's origins.
Some of their design might be patented, but I bet there's
lots of 17 year old or unpatentable stuff we
could do well to model.

Has advice by Chuck Grant like:

One of the things I teach in my classes
is: Never write code until you’ve found
three ways of doing it. A lot of people
[take] the first [approach] they think
of. Chances are, it’s the wrong way or
a less-than-perfect way. So you want to
find three approaches to the problem,
analyze all three of them, and then pick
the best. People just don’t do that. They
just don’t take the extra time to do that
extra step.

John Griessen


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-02 Thread Jason Childs

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:42 AM, John Dotyj...@noqsi.com wrote:

 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're
 a bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.
 That's our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is
 a sharp toolkit for the computer-savvy.

So is this why my simple bsearch patch for hid's hasn't been
incorporated in 3 months? I have to apply it every time I do a pull
from pcb git so that it doesn't segfault.  I'm sorry, but the tone as
of late on the mailing list has been our way or the highway, at
least from what I've read and encountered on the mailing list.  Heck
I've been afraid to post using gMail for fear of getting kicked from
the mailing list because of double posting or posting in RTF.  Frankly
if you can't see the current problems within the geda community that's
ashame, because it's a reflection of the product too and why thing's
haven't advanced.  The code base needs some serious refactoring to
advance and you need a programming team to do that work, not users,
however savvy they are.  I thought when I converted the gaf source
from using noweb it would open up a whole new opportunity for actual
software developers to start contributing, and I now regret the time I
lost doing it.


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:41:49 -0500, John Griessen wrote:

  http://www.edn.com/article/CA236.html?text=improving+on+pcb+design

Somewhere in the interview they mention the use of spreadsheets to 
manipulate symbols in a schematic. I guess, this is, what inspired 
gattrib. However, to be really useful during schematic capture, the 
spreadsheet needs to communicate more directly with the primary GUI. It 
needs to be called from the GUI on selected parts only. And it must 
prevent conflicts between the data in the spreadsheet and the data shown 
in the schematic GUI. From the user point of view, it should be part of 
the GUI just like the edit object dialog is. In a sense, it is and should 
feel like a multi symbol attribute dialog.

Are there plans to push gattrib toward this direction?

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 2, 2009, at 11:27 AM, Jason Childs wrote:

 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:42 AM, John Dotyj...@noqsi.com wrote:

 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're
 a bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.
 That's our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is
 a sharp toolkit for the computer-savvy.

 So is this why my simple bsearch patch for hid's hasn't been
 incorporated in 3 months?

No idea: I have nothing to do with pcb. I don't even use it.

 I have to apply it every time I do a pull
 from pcb git so that it doesn't segfault.  I'm sorry, but the tone as
 of late on the mailing list has been our way or the highway, at
 least from what I've read and encountered on the mailing list.

Well, I may be the crankiest one here. I am very concerned that some  
people don't recognize:

1. pcb is not the only layout tool gEDA supports.

2. ngspice (or gnucap, verilog, whatever your favorite is ...) isn't  
the only simulator.

3. Pointing and clicking is easy in simple cases, but it scales badly  
to large jobs.

4. Some of us have elaborate scripted builds for things like VLSI  
that use the toolkit nature of gEDA to excellent advantage, and fear  
that we will lose this capability.

   Heck
 I've been afraid to post using gMail for fear of getting kicked from
 the mailing list because of double posting or posting in RTF.  Frankly
 if you can't see the current problems within the geda community that's
 ashame, because it's a reflection of the product too and why thing's
 haven't advanced.

What some don't get is that the product is in many ways *more*  
advanced than the competition. If you don't appreciate this you are  
dangerous. Try using any other tool to draw schematics as input to  
symbolic circuit analysis with Mathematica. The cleanness and  
simplicity of the gEDA toolkit concept make things like this possible.

   The code base needs some serious refactoring

I agree here. But a qualification for a refactoring of gnetlist, for  
example, is writing and using custom back ends. If you haven't done  
that, you will never understand gnetlist's strengths, and you'll lose  
them.

 to
 advance and you need a programming team to do that work, not users,
 however savvy they are.

Programmers who aren't users will solve the wrong problems.

   I thought when I converted the gaf source
 from using noweb it would open up a whole new opportunity for actual
 software developers to start contributing, and I now regret the time I
 lost doing it.

Well, I at least appreciate that effort. Doxygen is a lot better:  
thank you. Maybe one of these days I'll understand libgeda well  
enough to work at that level. Your work makes that a more credible  
possibility.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
 On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:41:49 -0500, John Griessen wrote:
 
  http://www.edn.com/article/CA236.html?text=improving+on+pcb+design
 
 Somewhere in the interview they mention the use of spreadsheets to 
 manipulate symbols in a schematic.

I thought it was spreadsheet sifted layout data...a great paradigm for layout
where netlist and BOM lists need to be merged to get it done...
I was looking into this some more and read that the version Cadence OrCad bought
to be Orcad Layout is gone in favor of a stripped version of the
IC layout tools called Allegro based on LISP/Cadence Skill language...
so the tools bragged about in the article are nowhere now it seems!

There don't seem to be any freeware limited versions of Orcad Layout
at http://www.cadence.com/orcad/ just a mention that Orcad Layout was EOL 
phased out March 2009.
  Anyone know where to get an old demo version?  I'd
like to run it and look at it if it installs without logging you into Cadence 
to get the new version

  From the user point of view, it should be part of
 the GUI just like the edit object dialog is. In a sense, it is and should 
 feel like a multi symbol attribute dialog.
 
 Are there plans to push gattrib toward this direction?

Not yet.  Just trying to foster discussion for planning purposes.

Like this:
==
John Doty wrote:
  On Aug 2, 2009, at 11:27 AM, Jason Childs wrote:
The code base needs some serious refactoring
 
  I agree here. But a qualification for a refactoring of gnetlist, for
  example, is writing and using custom back ends. If you haven't done
  that, you will never understand gnetlist's strengths, and you'll lose
  them.
 
  to
  advance and you need a programming team to do that work, not users,
  however savvy they are.
 
  Programmers who aren't users will solve the wrong problems.
=

I refuse to believe there's no team at all, it's just a really
loosely connected one since there's no boss, and no paychecks involved... :-)

John


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Jason Childs wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:42 AM, John Dotyj...@noqsi.com wrote:
 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're
 a bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.
 That's our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is
 a sharp toolkit for the computer-savvy.
 
 So is this why my simple bsearch patch for hid's hasn't been
 incorporated in 3 months? I have to apply it every time I do a pull
 from pcb git so that it doesn't segfault.  I'm sorry, but the tone as

speaking for myself, I'm barely keeping my head above water with my 
other commitments in life.  I would love to have a few weeks to go 
through all the patches and bugs in the pcb bug and patch databases and 
deal with them, but for the time being I just don't.

 however savvy they are.  I thought when I converted the gaf source
 from using noweb it would open up a whole new opportunity for actual
 software developers to start contributing, and I now regret the time I
 lost doing it.

I for one appreciate that work and I'm sure those behind the many many 
many commits since that conversion do too.

-Dan



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Jason Childs wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:42 AM, John Dotyj...@noqsi.com wrote:
 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're
 a bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.
 That's our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is
 a sharp toolkit for the computer-savvy.
 
 So is this why my simple bsearch patch for hid's hasn't been
 incorporated in 3 months? I have to apply it every time I do a pull
 from pcb git so that it doesn't segfault.

could you point me to that patch?

-Dan



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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

2009-08-02 Thread evan foss

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2ig...@inno.bme.hu wrote:
 On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote:

You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now.
Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind?

 For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very
 first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't
 work out as good as I expected. Reasons for this, in my opinion, are
 little issues: some seemingly unimportant convention of windows that
 windows users are so got used to that they do not want to switch to
 anything else, even if what they are currently using is the worst possible
 way of doing that thing. Some examples (and possible solutions):

That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am
not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn.

 - window manager; there are ways to make the live cd run a very similar
 window manager that windows has, but it will never be the same. Any little
 difference will annoy windows users.

Being annoyed until you get used to a new thing is a sign of their
being inflexible. Mac users are the same way in some cases when told
they need to use their command prompt. If it is just annoying to them
they will still get their work done.

 - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands
 or you see a prompt, that's the sign you are doing something wrong. On
 this, xgsch2pcb helped a lot but...

Again shame on them for being hostile to learning new and different things.

 - ... but these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg,
 this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this? Really, this

You as the teacher should have talked them down from this. Each tool
only does 1 thing very simply.

 was one of the big surprises for my students, that doing different tasks
 can be best achieved by using different tools. And this is not even about

Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks. How many
go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor?

 hjaving back annotation, it's purely about having everything in one big
 window. I am rather sure if anyone would come up with a tool that
 integrates xgsch2pcb, gschem and pcb into a single window with tabs,
 these users won't ever notice they are separate programs even if mouse
 commands are different in each window.

There was a time I wanted to do that. Then I realized it wasn't going
to be as flexable as using makefiles.

 - and if we are already here, the mouse. I remember I had hard time
 learning PCB and gschem; all the hotkeys and strange mouse controls. But

Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program
insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a
program that working in electronics I will likely never use.

 when I started, I understood these all have a reason, and the controls are
 optimized for smooth workflow. After the learning curve, using these
 bindings are really fast. However, windows users do not care about being
 fast. Really, it's not gEDA-specific. I remember the old, DOS versions of
 autocad. The same story there with the command line. Those who really

The current version of autocad still uses all those funny keys but
there are also menus you can use for the same thing. Funny but I think
geda does the same thing. I have not checked all the hotkeys.

 learned using acad back then had one hand on keyboard, one hand on
 mouse. Selecting objects and sometimes coordinates done with mouse,
 actions done using the keyboard. When I got to learn autocad at the
 university again, it was already a windows version: right click and a menu
 pops up. This way only one hand works, and selecting the line tool or the
 perpendicular menu item takes much longer then typing l or perp. Of
 course there was a command line in the windows version as well, but noone
 bothered to use it, teachers didn't even teach the commands. I remember I
 tried to show some of my classmates how much faster using commands can be,
 but they were totally uninterested. For gEDA, I believe this is another
 blocker for windows users: it is optimized for speed (of use). Of course

No it is a block to all users who want that speed. They could use the
graphical menus if they wanted too.

 mouse bindings can be changed and I guess it's not a big deal to add
 context sensitive menus for the right click, but without these, windows
 users won't take it serious. Really, number of popups matter...

 - drive letters; they do want to name their hard disk c: and they find
 it more convenient to remember their usb pendrive as f: than to remember
 it as /mnt/pendrive. Even if drive letters are assigned in an

In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the
desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB
stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in
the GUI.

This could all be solved by

Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

2009-08-02 Thread DJ Delorie


 speaking for myself, I'm barely keeping my head above water with my 
 other commitments in life.

That pretty much sums up my life too ;-)


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

John Doty wrote:

 I very much  
 hope that gEDA does not evolve into a dull tool.
   

I agree.  But I also agree with others who say that more could be done
to bridge the gap between us and a typical Windows user.  Who knows, as
a result we may end up attracting a developer or two with skills we
need.  If we could just do something to help them get started.

Like it or not, the Windows culture is very much into dull, boring
tools.  We can't show them a better way if we can't show them anything
at all!


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

John Doty wrote:
 On Aug 2, 2009, at 7:45 AM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:

   
 On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:42:20 -0600, John Doty wrote:

 
 His judgement is pretty much dead on.  Many people on this list are
 openly hostile to Windows users,
 
 The only hostility I see is to the attitude:
   
 Yet, the rest of your post is a perfect example for general windows
 hostility.
 

 Huh? It's not hostility to Windows, it's hostility to an approach to  
 software that isn't at all unique to Windows. Windows is a latecomer  
 to that approach. And, in fact, Windows doesn't force that approach  
 on the user. The barriers are in the users' minds, not in the system.  
 And that isn't unique to Windows, either.

 Here, the big difference here between Windows users and Mac users is  
 one person: Charles Lepple, who packages gEDA for MacOSX (hurray for  
 Charles!). So, there are no complaints that gEDA is unfriendly to Mac  
 users. That's all it takes.

 The integrated GUI approach has its uses: I'm typing this in Apple  
 Mail. But for less trivial jobs, it forces the user onto a low  
 productivity track.

 I'm hostile to bicycles with training wheels permanently attached.

   
 
 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants.  
 We're a
 bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.  
 That's
 our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is a  
 sharp
 toolkit for the computer-savvy.
   
 It is remarkably blunt in certain aspects. Aspects, that are very
 relevant to EDA. Lack of backannotation
 

 Is there any tool that *really* does backannotation well? I used a  
 commercial one where the backannotation wasted more time than just  
 doing the job by hand. I've heard similar complaints from others. But  
 it's something we can work on. Dan's .eco file suggestion is a good  
 one, because it could come from anywhere. My pins2gsch script is an  
 effective backannotion tool when you don't need graphical  
 connections. Dan's .eco file suggestion is a good one, because it  
 could come from anywhere. For non-hierarchical schematics, attribute  
 backannotation looks pretty simple. But this is another place I wish  
 gnetlist was more transparent: if the back end could see the  
 hierarchy, making a map that would help a backannotation script find  
 the attributes would be trivial.

 But I probably wouldn't use full backannotion in my flows anyway.  
 Keep the source files clean, transform them into intermediates as  
 needed. Good tools could do it either way.

   
 and a more than stony interaction
 with simulation tools are just two of them.
 

 One problem is that the simulation tools don't play so nice. gEDA's  
 advantage, though, is that it can work with any one of them.

 Sounds like you want a schematic plug-in to gnucap. And then you'll  
 want a schematic plug-in to PCB. Those wouldn't be bad things,  
 especially if they used .sch format for the files. But let's keep  
 gEDA's modular, flexible kit modular and flexible (there's even room  
 for improvement here). A schematic plugin to bin/* is not the answer.
   

One of the ways that the gdb guys cracked this nut was to push a lot of
their functionality into libraries, and create an HID-centric API for
them.  They include a command-line-interface implementation by default,
but then others can take those same libraries and build their own GUIs
around them.  And drag in libraries from other places to add
functionality that gdb doesn't itself provide.  So now Eclipse, DDD,
Insight, and many other frontends can all use the same gdb backend
rather than inventing their own.  Everybody wins.

If the GUIs around gschem and pcb were not tightly coupled to the
internal functionality (I don't know that they really are, I'm just
saying...) then one could define and implement a clear division between
what was GUI and what was core functionality--- and if someone wanted an
integrated schematic-capture-plus-pcb-layout tool, they would
incorporate both geda core libraries and pcb core libraries underneath
their own GUI implementation.

I think this approach is a nice way to have your cake and eat it, too. 
Each tool can remain a standalone component, or you can stitch them
together at a higher level without resorting to behind-the-scenes shell
scripting and so forth.  It has worked well for gdb, at least.

Just a thought.  :)


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
 On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:41:49 -0500, John Griessen wrote:

   
  http://www.edn.com/article/CA236.html?text=improving+on+pcb+design
 

 Somewhere in the interview they mention the use of spreadsheets to 
 manipulate symbols in a schematic. I guess, this is, what inspired 
 gattrib. However, to be really useful during schematic capture, the 
 spreadsheet needs to communicate more directly with the primary GUI. It 
 needs to be called from the GUI on selected parts only. And it must 
 prevent conflicts between the data in the spreadsheet and the data shown 
 in the schematic GUI. From the user point of view, it should be part of 
 the GUI just like the edit object dialog is. In a sense, it is and should 
 feel like a multi symbol attribute dialog.
   

That's exactly the kind of stuff that becomes possible--- but in a
flexible way--- when you emulate what was done with the GNU debugger,
gdb, a few years ago.  The refactored to put their core functionality
behind a layer that could be utilized by a GUI without that GUI being
tightly coupled to the internals of the code.


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

Jason Childs wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:42 AM, John Dotyj...@noqsi.com wrote:
   
 We're not a programming team implementing what Marketing wants. We're
 a bunch of computer-savvy users implementing what we intend to use.
 That's our strength. That's why gEDA is different. That's why gEDA is
 a sharp toolkit for the computer-savvy.
 

 So is this why my simple bsearch patch for hid's hasn't been
 incorporated in 3 months? I have to apply it every time I do a pull
 from pcb git so that it doesn't segfault.  I'm sorry, but the tone as
 of late on the mailing list has been our way or the highway, at
 least from what I've read and encountered on the mailing list.  Heck
 I've been afraid to post using gMail for fear of getting kicked from
 the mailing list because of double posting or posting in RTF.  Frankly
 if you can't see the current problems within the geda community that's
 ashame, because it's a reflection of the product too and why thing's
 haven't advanced.

I'm a relatively late arrival to the geda community, so I can't comment
on any trends (and I come from the Linux kernel community, who is openly
hostile towards pretty much everyone so I have an unusually thick
skin).  But I definitely sense a lot of resistance to change.

I have a hunch that some of the ambivalence comes from, It was hard
enough to get things to this point!-thinking.  And it's also obvious
that many members of the community have a substantial investment in the
way geda works today that nobody wants to see invalidated.

Tough spot to be in, methinks.  :)  And not one that someone with the
skills and initiative would be able to challenge without making it a
full-time assignment.  And who can financially afford that?

I'm a freelancer who uses a lot of the tools I write, I'd love a
1-man-year contract to clean up geda and pcb.  But I bet I'm not the
only one who would--- and that's the kind of effort we're talking about
here.  Any givers?


 I thought when I converted the gaf source
 from using noweb it would open up a whole new opportunity for actual
 software developers to start contributing, and I now regret the time I
 lost doing it.
   

I'm not familiar with your effort, but I'm certain it laid the
groundwork for the refactoring that you desire.


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

2009-08-02 Thread Bob Paddock

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan fossevanf...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2ig...@inno.bme.hu wrote:
 On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote:

You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now.
Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind?

 For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very
 first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't
 work out as good as I expected...

 That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am
 not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn.

Real men program in C was just posted on Embdded.com

http://www.embedded.com/design/218600142 :

I learned the quiche-like phrase assigns both a high difficulty
factor to the C language and a certain age group to C programmers. Put
simply, C was too hard for programmers of their [young] generation to
bother mastering.

 - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands

Most Windows users simply can't type at all. I've seen that far to often
when I'm trying to teach one to use a program. :-(

 Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks.

The ones that are good with EMACS will.  Especially with the new Butterfly
command in 23.1. :-)

 How many go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor?

My onion dicier might work better at that task...

 Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program
 insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a
 program that working in electronics I will likely never use.

AutoCAD is very valuable in electronics for the correct tasks, like
board dimensions and footprints.

When I was in school I thought I'd never need English, who cares
what you end your sentences with [SIC].  Now years later I find
I'm writing publications for places like CDC/NIOSH, posting messages
like this for many to read etc.  Never Say Never.

 In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the
 desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB
 stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in
 the GUI.

 This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32
 partition to transfer files between windows and linux on.

Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting
fired.  Its the IT way or the highway usually to the detriment of the company
in the long term.

 I think most of your problems were user issues not usability issues.

Blame the user doesn't really help in any issue.

What's important is not that we can conceive the idea, but that when
we actually test it on people you discover it doesn't work... your
intuition is wrong. - Daniel M. Russell (IBM Almaden / Xerox PARC)

There are published user guidelines for GUIs:

User Experience:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/ue/index.html

Design Specifications and Guidelines - Visual Design:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997619.aspx

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines:
http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/

Those are from the wxWidgets reference I have at hand, I'm sure
there are ones for QT and KDE and most others as well.

 John Dotty made a good point that if the windows users want it let one
 of them maintain it.

I agree, and I've been the most vocal over the years here about it, and keep
trying to get there.  Alas like everyone else here we have day jobs
and other commitments to keep us from doing what we would really
like to be doing.

 This community exists because all of us wanted an
 open source EDA tool. If people really wanted a windows one then where
 are they?

They are at KiCAD http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/ ,

 http://www.freepcb.com/  note the links to TinyCAD for schematic,
LTSpice for simulation, and OrCAD Demo (At one time there was a much
older full package at the Yahoogroup I mentioned in the other message)
http://www.freepcb.com/resources.htm ,

AutoTrax http://www.kov.com/ (seems to switch back and forth between
open source and not open source over the years, not sure of the
current state)

I probably could go on without much effort.

 be volunteering to help maintain a windows release.

Maintaining it is far different than getting it to work correctly in
the first place.
I can't say much about gEDA (the schematic part) on Windows as I don't
use it there, but PCB I do use weekly on Windows and it has some
significant problems related
to printing and library management.  One of my Windows printing
patches is in the patch tracker, need to work more on some of the
other related sections.  I've started to think it would be easier just
to start off with wxWidgets from scratch after looking
at what it takes to get PCB to print on Windows as it currently stands
on Windows (I'm spoiled by

Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg

John Doty wrote:

 1. pcb is not the only layout tool gEDA supports.
   

Can you suggest some others?


b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
b...@billgatliff.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

Bob Paddock wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan fossevanf...@gmail.com wrote:

 This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32
 partition to transfer files between windows and linux on.
 
 Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting
 fired.  Its the IT way or the highway usually to the detriment of the 
 company
 in the long term.

I hadn't thought about that before somehow... yes, starting up a liveCD
in the office where IT rules rule would be like injecting a virus in the 
corporate culture!
Still, I do hear some of that going on -- must be in small renegade groups 
though.

Thanks for the other programming thoughts.

John
-- 
Ecosensory   Austin TX


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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:30:54 -0400, evan foss wrote:

 If people really wanted a windows one then where are they?

In the kicad user group? Hanging out in eagle.support.eng?
 
Note, that the vast majority of users don't demand better software. They 
just take, what is there. If it doesn't fit their needs, they use 
something else.

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg


On Aug 2, 2009, at 5:41 PM, Bill Gatliff wrote:

 John Doty wrote:

 1. pcb is not the only layout tool gEDA supports.


 Can you suggest some others?

Look at the list of gnetlist back ends. My customers usually have  
their favored layout designers or contractors, with their favored  
tools, so I export whatever they want. For my VLSI work, that's a  
stripped-down hierarchical SPICE netlist that I generate with the  
spice-sdb back end (thanks, Stuart) and a Makefile that cat's the  
pieces together.

In other cases I've had to write my own back ends. I thoroughly  
appreciate how easy this is. The Osmond and Calay back ends I wrote  
are part of the regular distribution. Osmand was particularly easy  
because they fully document their netlist format: no guesswork required.

I also have a gnetlist back end for Lincoln Laboratory's old PH70 PCB  
layout tool, but as I believe the last user of that has retired, I  
don't suppose it's worth distributing ;-)

I've been using gEDA since 2002, but I've never used pcb. That may  
change in the near future: there are a couple of potential projects  
coming up where I expect to do my own layout. Nice to know it's there.

John Doty  Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
j...@noqsi.com




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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

2009-08-02 Thread evan foss

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Bob Paddockbob.padd...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan fossevanf...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2ig...@inno.bme.hu wrote:
 On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote:

You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now.
Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind?

 For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very
 first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't
 work out as good as I expected...

 That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am
 not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn.

 Real men program in C was just posted on Embdded.com

 http://www.embedded.com/design/218600142 :

 I learned the quiche-like phrase assigns both a high difficulty
 factor to the C language and a certain age group to C programmers. Put
 simply, C was too hard for programmers of their [young] generation to
 bother mastering.

The end is near.

 - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands

 Most Windows users simply can't type at all. I've seen that far to often
 when I'm trying to teach one to use a program. :-(

 Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks.

 The ones that are good with EMACS will.  Especially with the new Butterfly
 command in 23.1. :-)

Sorry as a VIM user I just don't agree. :)

 How many go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor?

 My onion dicier might work better at that task...

LOL

 Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program
 insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a
 program that working in electronics I will likely never use.

 AutoCAD is very valuable in electronics for the correct tasks, like
 board dimensions and footprints.

True.

 When I was in school I thought I'd never need English, who cares
 what you end your sentences with [SIC].  Now years later I find

Yes I know my grammer is frequently faulty.

 I'm writing publications for places like CDC/NIOSH, posting messages
 like this for many to read etc.  Never Say Never.

Fair enough.

 In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the
 desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB
 stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in
 the GUI.

 This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32
 partition to transfer files between windows and linux on.

 Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting
 fired.  Its the IT way or the highway usually to the detriment of the 
 company
 in the long term.

See in the places I have worked it hasn't been an issue. Both
organizations had the attitude that what ever you need or want to use
for the job is what you should get. This is of course budget limited.

 I think most of your problems were user issues not usability issues.

 Blame the user doesn't really help in any issue.

Ok. My attitude was wrong. Sorry guys.

 What's important is not that we can conceive the idea, but that when
 we actually test it on people you discover it doesn't work... your
 intuition is wrong. - Daniel M. Russell (IBM Almaden / Xerox PARC)

 There are published user guidelines for GUIs:

 User Experience:
 http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/index.html
 http://developer.apple.com/ue/index.html

 Design Specifications and Guidelines - Visual Design:
 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997619.aspx

 GNOME Human Interface Guidelines:
 http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject

 GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
 http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/

 Those are from the wxWidgets reference I have at hand, I'm sure
 there are ones for QT and KDE and most others as well.

 John Dotty made a good point that if the windows users want it let one
 of them maintain it.

 I agree, and I've been the most vocal over the years here about it, and keep
 trying to get there.  Alas like everyone else here we have day jobs
 and other commitments to keep us from doing what we would really
 like to be doing.

 This community exists because all of us wanted an
 open source EDA tool. If people really wanted a windows one then where
 are they?

 They are at KiCAD http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/ ,

  http://www.freepcb.com/  note the links to TinyCAD for schematic,
 LTSpice for simulation, and OrCAD Demo (At one time there was a much
 older full package at the Yahoogroup I mentioned in the other message)
 http://www.freepcb.com/resources.htm ,

 AutoTrax http://www.kov.com/ (seems to switch back and forth between
 open source and not open source over the years, not sure of the
 current state)

 I probably could go on without much effort.

So then why do people still keep coming here demanding gEDA be more
like those programs?

 be volunteering to help maintain a windows release.

 Maintaining it

Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:16:10 -0400, evan foss wrote:

 So then why do people still keep coming here demanding gEDA be more like
 those programs?

I have been reading this list long enough to say, that they don't.
Ok, there have been one and a half cases since 2005. This is hardly 
a base to make a realistic asessment what the windows users want.

 Oh. I though there was a cygwin build or something from a long time ago
 and it was just not maintained.

There is a cygwin based install and a version compiled for windows.
I put both for download on the server at my day-job:
http://bibo.iqo.uni-hannover.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fertigung:start

There is an english version of the install howto:
http://bibo.iqo.uni-hannover.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fertigung:englische_version_der_anleitung

Both installs include gaf and pcb. I'd be happy to hear how smooth the 
windows versions run. However, no comments arrived, yet.

---(kaimartin)---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg