Um, with all due respect....I don't consider myself 'simple minded'....I am a professional EE, been working in this industry for a 28+ years, and have a few technical advanced degrees.I have both worked in and managed groups of EEs doing state of the art EE research and design. So, while I am not a hard core EDA user, I have used commercial tools from time to time, ranging from schematic capture to all out intricate board spins. I looked at opensource EDA tools perhaps 10- yrs ago, and decided Eagle was a better option. I decided to look again...my first impression about geda: I liked the philosophy (loosely integrated, extensible, multioptioned tool approach). I looked further...a lot of the last revised dates on documents and some tool drops were YEARS - giving the distinct impression of a dead/dormant effort. I polled a few NG that cater to practicing EEs...gEDA feedback was non-existant. Since I needed to get up to speed fairly quickly, I decided to RTFM and try it. While I fully acknowledge the "difficulty" of producing good documentation, without conveying the mechanics to potential users, you will loose them, guaranteed. (as an aside, that comment smacks of high power, overly clever sw developers who relish that fact they can program anything but can't keep focused on the real requirements). The more I read, the more I figured I had to 'write my own' scripts to do things (after all, if things don't work what else is there to do?). Um, I did not expect that I'd have to do that much additional work to get what I needed. As my attempts to do simple things resulted in trying yet another tool/approach, the frustrations built, productivity went to zero. Another impression, look at the websites of the two tools. One is definitely more polished than the other. That casts a big impression on potential users. If I have to hunt through 6 different websites and then burrow down 4-5 levels to find out the 'better' tutorial or find out how to do a BoM, that is one sure way to put off potential new users. Hmmm, free speech and free beer...I know there is no 'free lunch'...I have contributed to some open source efforts in the past, by way of small how to's, specialized scripts to do things, etc. I even started to 'clean up' the 2006 tutorial as I went along, figuring I'd 'give back'....As I progressed, It became clear that it would be a much bigger job than what I had time for. and finally: "Smart people seems to have not really big problems with current gEDA state." If you believe that, you are seriously deluding yourselves. I came across posts from two university instructors who gave up using the tools (I would not consider them 'simple minded'). In a nutshell, user frustration got the best of them. I gave one of my summer students the job of trying to use gschem+pcb....he plain gave up b/c of inefficient use of his time. So, while this is a small sample, it may be wise to consider these issues as the project moves forward. OK, well sorry about the critical posts - it is not personal. If I violated protocol, I apologize. Some insightful ppl made some very good observations about the CERN situation...perhaps those observations may lead to changes for the good.
On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Stefan Salewski <[1]m...@ssalewski.de> wrote: Hello John, I am really happy (and a bit of surprised) that critical postings are still allowed for this list. On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 22:07 -0400, John Hudak wrote: > You might want to consider import/export capability for the most widely > used commercial product (not sure what that is at the moment). Import/Export is fine for all free/open available formats. Unfortunately many important formats are not free, so we would have to do reverse engineering or use confidential leaked documentation. Some of us refuse to do that, including me. An example is the specctre format. > You may want to consider the following as well: > 1) An updated tutorial that is accurate Yes, to make simple minded people happy we need all that. Smart people seems to have not really big problems with current gEDA state. The problem with simple minded people (like me :-) ) is, that they are consumers (stupid and greedy), with no intention and skills to really contribute. And they do not understand or care about the difference between free speech and free beer. Many of your points are easily to fix even for people with no programming skills, ie. writing new, really fine documentation. But it is hard, boring work, so I do understand that the developers prefer coding. DJ has done it very well with his [2]http://www.delorie.com/pcb/docs/gs/gs.html -- unfortunately some beginners miss that tutorial. And it would be fine to have a few more clean and consistent documents like this. Do you think all that is really better for other tools? I am not convinced. Best regards, Stefan Salewski References 1. mailto:m...@ssalewski.de 2. http://www.delorie.com/pcb/docs/gs/gs.html
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