On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 10:57 -0500, Jason wrote: > Chris Cole wrote: > > Just curious, why not include xgsch2pcb functionality inside of gschem? > > > > As an aside, the first thing that lept to mind, was the Unix philosophy > of "one tool, one job." So, I started digging to find where it came > from. It's one of those "quoted all over the place, but no origin to be > found" kind of phrases. > > The best I could find was this [1], which sums it up nicely.
That fits really well with a command-line approach. It really increases usability of the whole. I would also venture to suggest that this design philosophy has (probably) come about from a time when GUIs were not in common use. With a GUI approach - the boundaries of the user interface do not need to match the logical boundaries of the operations involved. Things become more document oriented. Why should I load "open-office-print-spooler" when I can click the print button in my "open-office-text-editor" program? IMO, the Unix philosophy can still apply - only you have to look deeper under the user-interface. Libraries, code abstraction and similar techniques play a part. Defined interfaces between separate programs are also important - such as the file-based forward-annotation interface between gschem and PCB. "libgerbv" is good at loading gerbv files. That means we could add that functionality to a number of other programs as convenient without re-inventing the wheel. We don't need (or want) separate GUI tools such as gbr2pcb gbr2lpr gbr2pdf gbr2ps, as might be sensible for UNIX command line tools. (NB. Such tools could probably be implemented quite trivially using libgerbv) The really important point, is not to forget that individual automatable tasks can still be _very_ useful in a work-flow. The question should not be "why does your schematic editor have a kitchen-sink attached", rather.. can I still use a separate "kitchen-sink" if I want to. > I personally don't use xgsch2pcb. I run gsch2pcb from a Makefile, but > that's my personal preference. I prefer to script jobs that shouldn't > need to be interactive. ymmv. I use scripts a lot when working with text-based tasks, such as programming and building code. For gEDA, when working in a GUI, I find xgsch2pcb much more convenient than typing. Similarly with Lyx.. I let its GUI take care of building the right image formats and running pdflatex for me. I _could_ do it manually, but I find it much more convenient to hit the "preview PDF" button in the editor GUI. Best regards, Peter C. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
