Hi, [snip] > In my search for information, I came across the fact > that gEDA was using noweb, but that there was a rather > abrupt switch starting about 2005 or 2006.
Yes, gEDA/gaf was using noweb. It was my experimentation with literal programming. I chose noweb because it was available on most platforms and its syntax (at first) seemed fairly sane. > > What exactly were the reasons for utterly abandoning > noweb (and literate programming in general)? > > (1) build troubles? > (2) explaining to people? > Building with noweb and the auto* tools was fairly straightforward, though getting things like make distcheck to work right were tricky (I don't think I succeeded 100%). It really came down to several issues why noweb got removed: 1) It was completely foreign to almost all developers. If you didn't use emacs to edit the noweb code, it was exceedingly difficult to make even the simplest of changes. Things were made even worse when the code chunks came into play. These made looking at and following the code even harder (as it wasn't always a linear organization to the source code). 2) Debugging executables which were built from noweb sources was somewhat painful. Sometimes there was line number skew between what was being debugged and the source code. This problem was solved towards the end of the noweb experiment with some macros and/or compile time command line flags. 3) There was this alway constant complaint/whine: "what's with this noweb thing". I grew quite tired of explaining and defending it. :-) 4) Having make distcheck work out of the box is really nice and makes my life so much easier when cutting releases. Instead of using noweb (or any other literal programming mechanism), gEDA/gaf migrated to using doxygen which most people don't seem to mind. Also, once noweb usage was removed from gEDA/gaf, the number of code contributions grew and the developers seemed much happier. Hope that helps, -Ales -- Ales Hvezda [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
