gEDA-dev: Improvements to the gEDA suite for educational use

[DJ Delorie]

> We have two or three students (including myself) intending to
> contribute software development over the summer vacation to improve
> the usability and integration of the suite.

Yay and thanks!  Please feel free to ask questions here, this is our
equivalent of a "chat room" for developers.

> libraries, DRC rules, drill mappings etc.. are all appropriate for
> the

Note that PCB uses a "vendor file" that has some of this information
in it; managing that would be useful.

> (We may offer different cut-down parts libraries for different
> student projects).

Note: www.gedasymbols.org

I can give out CVS accounts for gedasymbols to the people actually
creating symbols and footprints; I've been using my checked-out cvs
area as the symbol and footprint path the tools use, so everything
stays in sync.

> Whilst there is a motion from the Engineering Department to
> introduce heavy weight in house parts libraries, e.g. having
> footprint and some SPICE parameters pre-defined, it is clear that
> this isn't in keeping with the gEDA design philosophy - and such
> we'd end up with the difficult task maintaining a local parts
> library.

Please check the mail archives for my discussions about the attribute
mapping database.  Gedasymbols supports such files (as CSV tables),
see http://www.gedasymbols.org/csv.html and
http://www.gedasymbols.org/user/dj_delorie/test.csv

The idea is to keep gschem symbols light, but have a huge database
that lets you interactively go from light to heavy on a per-project
and per-symbol basis.

I think my idea for the database would work well with your ideas for
how to interact with the user.