gEDA-dev: [PATCH] GAF: Solve the "transistor problem"

[Dan McMahill]

DJ Delorie wrote:
>> That's the hard way.
> 
> So?  We're designing electronics, not painting pictures.
> 
>> The easy way is to copy the symbol to your project's symbol
>> directory with a new name, fix it up, leaving the pins where they
>> are, and then change the symbol name in the sch file with an
>> editor. Not hard at all. Maybe a little GUI magic over this kind of
>> process would help newbies, though.
> 
> He's trying to do the gui magic :-)
> 
> Me, I'd much rather have the pictoral symbol separate from the
> connectivity information.  We already split out the footprint, and
> it's way too much "heavy symbolism" to say we should have one symbol
> per package.
> 
>> This seems to represent a specific vision of how gEDA is to be used.  
> 
> Or at least how it *can* be used.  Today, nothing stops you from
> creating a heavy symbol library, but the technology stops you from
> creating a light symbol library.  Let's fix that so we can do both.

I'm becoming more and more in favor of a light symbol library that is 
designed to work with a simple database to marry symbols and footprints 
and the associated pin outs to create a heavy component library.  I 
hacked together a proof of concept (of sorts) for npn and pnp 
transistors with 3 package pins and it worked like a champ.  One pnp 
symbol, 1 npn symbol, 1 simple text file and out pops lots of heavy 
symbols that don't take any effort to use.  Much better than having to 
make sure that the pin numbering between one of n different npn symbols 
matches the pin numbering on the appropriate package and remembering 
which footprint name to enter each time.

This could easily be extended to have additional attributes to specify 
how each heavy symbol netlists for your favorite simulator.

Makes me think though that we need to come up with a standard way to 
define attributes for particular backends to avoid possible namespace 
collisions.

-Dan