> 2. I think we will use PCB for a long time coming yet. You might > experience difficulty selling your idea to the F/OSS Fundis, who > don't like anything commercial. Moreover, although there is a lot of > talk about new features for PCB, I suspect that there is not that much > development activity in this direction. Finally, one of PCB's nice > features is that the file format is (sort of) well documented, and is
I would rather say "the file format PCB used about year ago is well documented". I have written some doc patches and put them on sourceforge and they weren't incorporated yet. I am starting to worry about forgetting where I have the patched version of the doc and one nice shiny day removing the whole -patched ource tree, therefore flushing my previous doc patch work down the toilet. Therefore I better not patch the doc anymore and wait until the patches emerge on pcb.sourceforge.net ;-) > easy to process & script (as you know). (As for documentation, Steve > Meier has a nice doc describing it, and he and I have worked up a next > rev which is currently waiting for the PCB developers to look at and > check.) > > Since a new F/OSS PCB layout package is probably a long way off, we > are left with PCB for the forseeable future. Perhaps an easy project Does making another free software PCB layout tool make sense? > is to create a file translator which takes the Board Station database > & converts it to PCB format. This would be a first step, and would Yes. I don't think adopting existing proprietary-roots fileformats is a good idea. Compare: PNG vs. GIF Ogg Vorbis vs. MP3 Cl<
