gEDA-dev: footprint cleanup

[Dan McMahill]

Peter TB Brett wrote:
> On Monday 28 August 2006 22:28, Dan McMahill wrote:
> 
>>Peter TB Brett wrote:
>>
>>>Is it possible to just put arbitrary numbers into these? For instance, if
>>>I try and instantiate a ACY1050 will it complain?
>>
>>yes and no.  Given what I'm hoping to do soon (move the m4 invocation to
>>compile time instead of run time), "no" is the one you should probably
>>work with.
>>
> 
> 
> Shame, since I'd just thought of several uses for that.  In particular, in a 
> current design I've got some really big axial caps that the selection of ACY* 
> footprints don't go large enough for.
>
> I anticipate being able to instantiate arbitrary length/drill hole/pad size 
> ACY* footprints as very useful.

What you are able to feed m4 while pcb is running is quite constrained. 
      You can feed m4 a bit more from gsch2pcb, but I'd much rather run 
the footprint generator to make all footprints you need outside of pcb 
and then have pcb load them.

>>The thing I don't particularly care for is that there is no real reason
>>that we can't run m4 over all the footprints at compile time or maybe
>>even at 'make dist' time.  The results could be put into a newlib
>>library and then you don't need m4 at runtime anymore.
> 
> 
> No, I don't think that's a good idea at all, with no offence meant.  What I 
> *do* think is that a clearer delineation between, and explanation of, the two 
> different libraries would be very useful.  For instance, rather than 
> pregenerating the list of available M4 footprints for display in the pcblib, 
> why not have some sort of automatically generated documentation of the syntax 
> for a particular footprint type.
> 
> Rather than "newlib" and "pcblib", what about "Footprints" and "Footprint 
> Generators"?  Then in "Footprint Generators", you could have a number of 
> generators ("DIL Packages", "Axial Through-Hole Components", "Radial 
> Through-Hole Components") each of which exposes a bunch of controls and 
> a "Generate" button.  There'd also be a field that shows the footprint 
> attribute string that you could copy and paste into your schematic.

I don't think the m4 libraries right now are good candidates for that. 
Really you should view the m4 libraries as a generator like what John 
has except written with a system that's confusing.  I would consider the 
internal macros to be internal.


-Dan