I've been using gEDA for a while, and have been following this thread closely. There have been a lot of good arguments from all sides for how things should work. I'm wondering if we should take a more pragmatic way of looking at things. There are a few options: a) keep the slotting behavior the same as it currently is. b) making the slotting behavior make specific for multiple gates/devices on a single chip such that it cannot be used/"abused" for other purposes. c) make the slotting mechanism simpler and more generic so that (at least in gschem) it is primarily just another attribute.
What I would propose would be to leave the slotting behavior alone for the time being (option a), but hopefully mark it for deprecation in some future version, as it can be confusing and is not well defined. Meanwhile, create a new, separate generic (pin) mapping mechanism (option c). This may just involve defining some new attributes, but should support a slotting functionality, some type of symbol->component->footprint workflow, and as many other commonly used workflows as could be supported. However, any of these specific workflows should be implemented as scripts/plugins. This would likely require some changes to libgeda, or exposing other internals, but is probably something that should be done anyways. I would then like to see someone come up with a equivalent (or hopefully better) slotting mechanism, at which point the current slotting mechanism should be deprecated. Besides the netlisting, I don't think the scripting/extensibility of gEDA have really been taken advantage of. Even with PCB I was impressed with capabilities of plugins (although these are also under-utilized), but have not seen the equivalent in gschem. For the few additional features I've needed, I've tended to just write a perl script to parse the .sch or .pcb files directly, although it would probably be more appropriate using the scripting capabilities already available in the tools. -Henry
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