gEDA-dev: Tighter integration of gEDA and PCB?

[Dan McMahill]

John Doty wrote:
> On Jun 3, 2007, at 12:36 AM, terminator356 at users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> 
>> Also, what are your thoughts on eventual total integration of gEDA
>>  and PCB?
> 
> A large part of the utility of gEDA is that it *isn't* integrated,  
> but plays nicely with many different tools, PCB among them. The  
> biggest job I've done with gEDA is a VLSI chip design: no printed  
> circuit board or footprints there! I've also used gEDA in three  
> different printed circuit flows, but never with PCB: each customer  
> has their own favorite here. And then there's simulation.
> 
> So to me, it is important that gEDA remain neutral and not commit to  
> any specialized vision of the design flow.

My vision there is something akin to major modes in emacs.  Emacs is not 
tied to C or lisp or LaTeX, but it has modes which make it nice for 
editing any of those.  I made it part way down the path of a "pcb mode" 
for gschem but never quite finished it.  I did get as far as being able 
to cross probe between schematic and layout though and did it in a way 
where all of the details about interfacing to pcb were contained in a 
single pcb.scm file.  All the changes which went back into 
libgeda/gschem proper were generic in nature.

I could picture having a gnucap mode, a spice mode (perhaps these should 
be minor modes based on a common simulator major mode to further borrow 
from emacs terminology), a pcb mode, a VLSI mode (perhaps 1 per backend 
flow), etc.  If libgeda/gschem provide sufficiently powerful functions 
for such modes, then this should be possible.

-Dan