Re: gEDA: Comments request

[Matthias Wenzel <geda-dev-at-NOSPAMmazzoo_dot_de>]

Carlos Nieves Ónega wrote:
>   - Noweb: I don't know anyone who has benefit of using it. If we want
[...]
> documentation too. Is anyone still using noweb? who wants to drop noweb?
my full agreement.
I think noweb even keeps dev-newbies from creating patches. I recently 
created my 1st patch, but I was doing all changes in .c files, and 
"backported" it to noweb to create a propper patch.

> Any volunteers to do the work?

I start looking into it, but my gEDA machine is very slow, so I may get 
bored in changing the build process...

> [OK/cancel buttons reversed / #definable]

secondary cosmetics to me.


>   - Unsaved schematics warning when exiting: I always have to read the

secondary cosmetics to me.


>   - Attributes for packaging/automated refdes assignation: currently if
> you want to use an heterogeneus part, you have to assign the same refdes
> to the symbols by hand. I'd prefer to assing some attribute which tells
> gschem/gannotate that those symbols should be in the same physical part,
> and if there can be another symbols automatically packaged into that
> part or not (maybe another attribute). It's like a "part set": if two
> symbols have the same part set, they should have the same refdes. Maybe
> this "part set" attribute can be like a description (I won't like it to
> be just a number, since I want to reuse a schematic across projects, and
> I don't want to track the numbers myself) added by the user, and the
> annotation utility should be aware of these special ones.

sounds good, but in a first-things-first thinking, I'd prefer seeing a 
much simpler thing improved:
autonumbering of refdes attributes as you add or copy components. On 
each add/copy gschem can scan for the largest number of refdes=part(N) 
and use part(N+1).
Should also work when I refdes my first resistor R100.

>   - Autosaving: having gschem automatically save every unsaved schematic
> every few minutes (user-defined). gschem can use another filename, like
> #real_name.sch#, like emacs, or real_name.sch~.... These files should be
> deleted when saving the page.

good idea! real_name.sch~ preferred, to avoid ugly #-shell escapes 
somewhere else.

>   - Autosaving when crashing: I know gschem shouldn't crash but, what if
> it happens some day?. What about automatically saving the schematics
> when crashing? I mean connecting the segfault signal to a function which
> saves the unsaved schematics using filenames like
> #real_name.sch.crashed#, real_name.sch.crashed, (depending on the
> filename chosed for the last point). Gschem should look for these kind
> of files when loading an schematic, and let's the user choose if he
> wants to load this file instead of the normal one.

good idea! segfault handling can be dangerous, but I guess most of the 
times it succeeds, and thus helps the user.

matthias