On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 08:41 -0600, John Doty wrote:
> On Jun 3, 2008, at 4:22 AM, Peter Clifton wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 19:14 -0600, John Doty wrote:
> >> On Jun 2, 2008, at 11:02 AM, Peter Clifton wrote:
> >
> >> What is "make" supposed to do with a dialog box?
> >
> > Nothing more than when it is expected to design your circuits for you.
> 
> I expect "make" to do what it does for software: propagate changes as  
> needed. If I change the package of the default resistor in a project  
> and type "make", I expect all data products for that project to  
> reflect the change.

Ok, then you'd either have it invoke the appropriate command to update
all elements from the command line (within the Makefile), or perhaps
some config would be set to make the tools always prefer the library
copy of a resource rather than the cached copy (just warn in the GUI if
it detects a change).

I thought you were arguing in favour of the previous behaviour, where it
is pretty hard, if impossible to auto-update the footprints in a .pcb
file.

> Unacceptable. In a large project, such warnings are lost in the spew.

You can't have it both ways.. a GUI dialog which warns you something
broke, or something which can work from the command-line.

What we should do is reduce un-necessary stdout / stderr spew, so that
any output which is printed is important information for you to review.

> When I change a symbol to fix a pin assignment, part number,  
> footprint, underlying hierarchical schematic, etc., I expect that  
> change to propagate. Among other things, it's part of design reuse:  
> in prototype maybe the default resistor is 0603, but in production  
> it's 0201. Some customers imagine hermetic packages improve  
> reliability, others are more sensible.

PCB's behaviour is the complete opposite of this, no automatic updates
are possible.

For either case, without caching some hash at least (if not a complete
copy, like PCB), there is no hope for ANY user to be notified about
library changes. If you don't want notifications / to use the cached
copy, there is no reason I can see why it couldn't be turned off.

> With symbol collections customized for the project, it's easy to move  
> schematics from project to project (especially if you turn off  
> automatic promotion of device and footprint attributes). So,  
> low_noise_npn.sym represents BCX70K in an SOT23 in one project,  
> 2N930JANTXV in a can in another.
> 
> >
> > In the case of divergent footprints / symbols which the user _wants_,
> > I'd imagine the GUI action to express this would then take the desired
> > symbol and dissociate it from the library copy, either giving it a
> > different name, or just flagging so in the file.
> 
> It seems to me that *all* project symbols should be disassociated  
> from the library copy and placed in the project symbol repository  
> (often under another name: low_noise_npn, small_resistor, etc.). But  
> embedding them in a schematic is a severe barrier to schematic reuse  
> in an different project.

I was talking about caching of a copy, or a hash value, not full
embedding with no subsequent use of external files.

(PS. My current project only has 40 non-library symbols, and
coincidentally, about 40 schematic pages after Makefile + sed based
auto-generation of a few multi-channel sections).

-- 
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!)



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