gEDA-user: Added PCB output to gnetman

[Dan McMahill]

Bill Cox wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I have started using gschem with David Rowe's Free Telephony Project,
> and while it's great, I miss my nice hierarchical design methodology I
> use for chip design with gschem.  So, I added pcb output.
> 
> I haven't tested it on an real PCB designs, so there are probably some
> goobers.  If you do use it, I'll try to support you.
> 
> Also, would anybody feel better about gnetman if I put it up on
> SourceForge?
> 
> Thanks,
> Bill

It seems that a big hurdle is that none of us have DataDraw so it makes 
it hard to feel like we (well, I) have access to the complete sources.

As far as putting it on sourceforge, that could mean many things.  I do 
think having cvs (or svn or whatever) contolled sources that can be 
browsed online and also accessed via anonymous cvs/svn is quite useful. 
  I also think a visible bug tracker is quite useful.  I'd also like to 
see some sort of release notes.  It can be hard to figure out what has 
changed between versions.

I'm still wondering what, if anything, could be done to take what has 
been learned in gnetman and get it back into gnetlist while somehow not 
breaking all of the existing netlisters at once.  I like that it is 
basically pretty easy to add gnetlist backends and that you don't have 
to recompile anything.  Also gnetlist uses (I think) the same libraries 
for parsing the .sch files so there isn't an issue of keeping a .sch 
parser in sync.  On the down side, gnetlist does not maintain hierarchy.

-Dan