Hi, Recently, I talked with some people about EDA tools and they main arguments against gEDA were:
1) no MS-windows support 2) missing components It's very nice to see that this two topics are heavily discussed here. As for the Parts Manager I read the proposal and I like to share some thoughts. First I like the idea very much to have a central unit which scopes with all kind of different inputs for gschem and pcb. I'm not sure how much a database would run against one fundamental of gEDA, which is the nice nativley use of pure text files. If there is a database, there would be a dependcy to install mysql or something similar, right ? The second thing is about the GUI. I guess it is a good idea to have one. However, please thing about that all data should be accessable from command line resp. from scripts as well. This is one of the very nice outstanding features of gEDA and it would be a pitty if I need to start a GUI to create changes to the database over and over again instead of running a 5 liner script to do that for me. Maybe there could be even some ncurse ... I think like the analogy .... apt-get --- aptitude --- synaptics Furthermore, as I said the main issue for people to switch from e.g. eagle to gEDA as far as I figured out is the amount of parts. I tried to explain them that gEDA strictly seperates symbols and footprints and achive a much higher flexibility with it. However, most people stick with the idea that they like to enter the exact part-name to the list and then it should be there. If there is a part manager, please think about a very very easy way to sync parts with official and unoffical public repositories. Maybe based on git or something like this. Everyone who uses gEDA might build already some exoctic footprints. There are just not published due to lack of time and resources. A simple upload wizard and a sync option would allow everyone to upload there own footprints and symbols very easily, fixing problems and bugs and finally have access to a steadily growing database. Just my two cents.. Torsten _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
