Re: gEDA-dev: SoC Hopeful

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2-at-NOSPAMcam_dot_ac_dot_uk>]

On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 23:45 -0400, Bob Sherbert wrote:
> Hello again,
> First off, I'd like to thank you all for the information and ideas
> provided, everything was very helpful in figuring my way around.
> Second, I've taken a lot of the suggestions in your messages as well
> as a few ideas of my own and hashed them into a design I think might
> be workable for a parts manager.  I'm submitting it here for
> comments/critiques/suggestions before I go and write my formal
> proposal. 

This all sounds good. I look forward to seeing your proposal. I look
forward to seeing it coded up too! I suspect once you've got the
data-structures solid, the code will "fall out". Figuring out the
data-structures was always my stumbling block.

I'll be keeping an interested eye on this project, as its something I've
fancied doing for a while - just never had the time. I might even be
able to help as I'm still doing re-factoring work on libgeda and gschem.
Certainly let me know where you need IPC to gschem + PCB, as I was
implementing some rudimentary DBus support in PCB, and intended to do
similar for gschem once its internals were tidied up.

How do you envisage managing "versioning" of parts (if we decide to
bother at all)?

I see you're thinking along the lines of piping output in the standard
footprint / symbol format. This sounds good. Excusing my poor
pseudo-bash, would this be something like a helper program to access
your parts database as:

gpartman --partid=AD12F397CD23 --type=gschem_symbol -o -

I think it is good to embed these symbols etc.. into the schematic by
defaulr - so the schematic can then be opened independently of the parts
manager, especially if the parts-manager fetches from an online
database. Most if not all the functionality to do this exist already.
(Anyhow.. a minor point).

One train of thought I had was to have a .parts directory, which
contained the symbols / footprints instantiated from the database. SHA1
IDs (like git source code management uses) is great for making
file-names to hash-store these sorts of things.

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)



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