On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 09:26 -0500, Stuart Brorson wrote: > >> It does leave open the question of how the person drawing the > >> schematic knows which footprint name to put into the footprint > >> attribute. If PCB has a good footprint editor, then the user can at > >> least preview the footprint before sticking it into his schematic. > >> > >> Comments? > > > > I have a patch which makes PCB take a command line argument > > --library-browser or some such, where it just pops up that one dialog > > window (with full preview), then prints to footprint names to stdout > > when an item is clicked on. > > > > This was intended to interface with a proposed API in gEDA for allowing > > a configurable mapping between attribute names, and some kind of offer > > to auto-complete, or provide a selection window for possible values. > > > > Sounds like something which might be worth reviving? > > Sounds cool! Is this supposed to be used with the DBUS communication > thingie?
Actually, I wrote that without using DBus. One of the main issues I'd had with the idea was keeping PCB's stdout clear so I could use it as the communication channel. DBus could indeed help. I'd have to give it a bit of thought as to just how we'd launch an instance of PCB to become a library preview, then ensure we're communicating with the one which we just launched (and will presumably kill at some point when we're done). Would we launch PCB each time the dialog needs to be shown, or keep it around in memory, but with the dialog hidden? Could multiple copies of gschem share the same PCB instance? Would they then have to share the same dialog, or could I teach PCB to open multiple dialogs? Could / should we make a more light-weight executable based on some of the PCB code, which _just_ does library browsing and symbol preview? -- 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 geda-dev@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
