gEDA: Gwave snapshot 20001123

[Steve Tell <tell-at-NOSPAMtelltronics_dot_org>]

After a great thanksgiving dinner, I figured out what was wrong with my
gwave RPMs, so the release is ready:  I've released another snapshot of
Gwave, my waveform viewer for spice output and other similar sorts of
tabular analog data.

New features include:

- Saving wave and panel configuration as guile scripts.
- Executing guile scripts from menu or command line (-s <script> option),
  to restore a saved configuration and for other uses.
- Remote control using the gwave-exec and gwaverepl utilities.

Source is available at the usual places, including
	http://geda.seul.org/dist/gwave-20001123.tar.gz

A source RPM and i386-binary RPM are available at
	http://www.cs.unc.edu/~tell/dist/
and perhaps soon from http://geda.seul.org/dist/rpm/.
This is my first attempt at creating RPMs, and while they work for me, 
they may not be perfect, so let me know if you have problems.


Just a few more words on the remote control facility, because I think its
pretty cool...

"gwave-exec" sends a single guile-scheme expression to a running
gwave process, where it is evaluated and the result returned.

"gwaverepl" is an interactive read-evaluate-print loop, in which multiple
expressions can be sent to gwave for evaluation, like an interactive guile
session.  It can be compiled with readline to provide history and editing.  
Its a great way to experiment with guile in the context of gwave while
constructing gwave scripts.


I hope someday to use this to implement cross-application communication,
for example: select a net in gschem, press the appropriate key or menu,
and the simulated waveform pops into view in gwave.

In addition, the remote-access code is modular and could be easily
borrowed for use by other applications, should there be interest.
It communicates through the X server, so the usual X permissions
apply - I didn't feel like inventing another security mechanism to keep
the whole world from running arbitrary guile code in someone's gwave.


enjoy,
Steve