I'm very interested in the parts manager / database / symbol / footprint ideas. Hopefully I'll get time to flesh them out more - perhaps code something up.
It has become apparent to me that gaf + PCB could probably do with a library / utility to search paths (specified by the relevant config files). This will be more important as more tools become aware of symbols, footprints etc. (e.g. the parts manager). I'd not like to loose the elegance of simple files for footprints / symbols, and at the same time realise that this is a limitation. We'd need to build index files, and association graphs for a proper parts manager, or the system won't scale. In addition, I foresee the parts-manager being able to connect to a server of some kind, be it company's own "parts server", or gedasymbols.org, gedaparts.org - whatever. This means that parts might not even be local to your computer until you've selected it for use. (And I'm still not sure if you'd copy the part's data, footprint and symbol locally, or embed it with a reference to its origin). TeX has a solution to this problem for finding fonts, DVI files, and all the other magic fluff that makes is go. "kpathsea". This is a library which searches paths.. http://www.tug.org/texinfohtml/kpathsea.html it is LGPL. I wounder if it might be useful. There are various standalone scripts which use this library, such as kpsewhich, and many TeX / metafont specific ones (just don't ask me regarding their usage). I have considered that it might be important to version-control a parts database, such that if I put a symbol in my schematic, and the library version gets updated - e.g. a pin moves, my schematic won't be broken. It would be nice to be able to check and see if new versions of a symbol are available (or be warned given symbols are not the latest versions). This could be done by embedding / storing a local copy of the symbol, and a version number. We could also version-control the parts database - so you could re-'get' the old version if so desired. -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!) _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
