geda-developers team mailing list archive

[Ivan Stankovic <pokemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 12:15:27PM +0000, Peter TB Brett wrote:
> On Sunday 16 December 2012 19:18:58 Ivan Stankovic wrote:
> 
> > It's nice that you brought this up since it shows the real problems in
> > current libgeda implementation that are preventing us from moving
> > forward and doing cool things. My feeling is that, however you intend
> > to solve these and other such problems, you will end up with a
> > rewrite of most of gEDA code.
> 
> We're probably going to need it anyway.  People have brought up some 
> concepts that need multithreading to work well (e.g. online DRC, 
> continually keeping a netlist up-to-date in the background, etc.), and 
> libgeda in its current state just isn't capable of doing that.  There 
> are also a bunch of ideas out there that would really benefit from 
> reference-counted primitives in the library, which we also lack.  If the 
> answer really is "Rewrite ALL THE THINGS", so be it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, it's just that similar efforts were not met
with much enthusiasm previously, to put it mildly.  In fact, I admire you for
showing an enormous amount of enthusiasm, long after I decided that all hope is
lost.

As always, if you decide to go with the rewrite, you'll have my full support
and I'll try to conribute both in the discussions and code.

> Ideally, it would be nice to do it in the context of the existing code, 
> so that we can bring all the tools along with us.

Right, and this is why I tried to not go too far from the original libgeda
design when I started on libeda, but that has its downsides. In the end, I'm
not sure whether it's worth the trouble.

> But I don't think I 
> can emphasise enough that I am not aiming for perfection, but for 
> *success*, i.e. delivering tools that people can use to do things.

I would very much like to see that happen.

-- 
Ivan Stankovic, pokemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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