Dear maintainer,
The removal request suggests to use lepton-eda as a drop-in replacement
for geda-gaf. I tested lepton-eda with one of my geda projects
("Lasertreiber"). This is a medium scale analogue circuit with a
hierarchy of three subcircuits. I noted a few issues:* Apparently, lepton was forked before docks were introduced to the GUI of gschem. Consequently, lepton-schematics still uses pop-up dialogues for frequent tasks like the choice of symbols or setting values of attributes. While geda-gaf 1.10 maintains the ability to work with pop-ups, it also supports docks that attach to the sides of the main window. IMHO, this makes the UI much more usable - no more need to constantly move mini windows around. The docks match the general UI paradigm of other design applications like freecad or inkscape, too. * Text in lepton-schematic is put almost but not quite at the same place as in gschem. It seems to be shifted up or down a little bit, depending on where the attachment point of the text is set. The amount of shift depends on the font size. It seems to be about an eighth of the font height. I like to carefully place labels close but not too close to symbols. This is noticeably affected by the shift. The result is still readable. The text is just positioned a little off. * Text in lepton-schematic is rendered larger than in gschem. Size increase is about 15 %. * lepton-schematic uses a different font family in print than on screen. The PDF shows text in a serif font while text on screen is shown in sans serif. This may be configurable. I just report on the defaults. * Version 1.10 of gschem saw a major usability improvement when dealing with hierarchies: In gschem a double-click on a subsheet symbol now opens the corresponding subsheet. To return, there is a nice big button in the row of actions. With lepton-schematics I still have to select the subsheet symbol and open a menu to go "down-schematic". * Issue reporting of potential problems on export of the netlist got noticeably better in geda. On import to the layout application pcb I now get warnings in a dialogue rather than on stdout. The messages themselves are much more legible, too. These changes came when the backends of geda got ported from scheme to python and were essentially rewritten in the process. Since lepton was forked to explicitly not move to python, the above improvements are missing in lepton. As you may have guessed from the comments, I like to work with the most up to date version of geda. I habitually pull the latest development version from the git repo and compile myself. So removal of geda from debian does not immediately affect my work flow. However, I also teach electronics. Removal of geda-gaf would put me in an awkward place. It would make it harder for the students to install the same set-up at home. What would it take to keep the original geda in Debian (preferably in the latest released version, that is 1.10)? Best regards, ---<)kaimartin(>--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Email: k...@familieknaak.de Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=index&search=0x7B0F9882
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