gEDA-user: 2 make errors installing gwave

[Dan McMahill]

al davis wrote:
> On Saturday 01 December 2007, Dan McMahill wrote:
>> How well to ascii output files scale when you want to write
>> out 30,000 node voltages and be able to pick out one to plot
>> without it taking a long time?  I don't know the answer, but
>> it seems like a binary format could have advantages there.
> 
> That's one of the reasons gnucap makes you choose the outputs 
> before you run.  Lots of node voltages are almost never the 
> variables I actually want.

That's all fine and there is a lot of value in only saving a subset of 
the outputs, but also there are times when someone might run a sim which 
takes 2 days and needs the ability to do a fair amount of trouble 
shooting on the results.  I'd rather have used up 15  Gb of disk space 
and have the data than wait 2 more days because I didn't save that one 
critical waveform.  It is still true that 99.9% of the data in that file 
is probably not useful, but it is a question of nailing that 0.1% before 
simulating.  I do realize that gnucap can provide even more outputs that 
just the node voltages so maybe the compromise is to not save all of 
those.

-Dan