kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

Tim,

This is a significant design change, and with it you might take home 
some marbles or you might end up on everybody's shit list, depending on 
what it adds and what it breaks. My original thoughts on this I've 
already expressed. I'll briefly restate them here: a feature like this 
could more safely be done by a separate utility which auto generates 
sheets for the stock, unmodified eeschema. The auto generation process 
can be done any way that makes sense, including using a template 
schematic (the one you *maintain* as a circuit designer, and the whole 
point of the discussion is that only one sheet is maintained).
Having said that, there are clearly and certainly other potentially 
excellent paths to the end goal, which stated again is roughly: 
"maintain one sheet, use several sheets like it".
Because your changes are significant, they would require non-trivial 
amounts of time for me to formulate an informed opinion on them. 
Unfortunately I do not want to spend that time now, and it would be 
easier if the code were in a place where we could see it. Maybe you 
could create a branch/tim directory in the svn repository and put your 
changes in there in directories where a person could pull those out and 
have them overwrite the base line working copy. See the subversion 
manual if you have questions. I can envision a partial tree consisting 
of the files that have changed only.
In any case the opinions will eventually roll in, either favorably or 
unfavorably. So you may end up being a hero, I am not saying one way or 
another here. This whole "macro templating" concept can be taken 
further of course, and has been done so in other places in life.

> I'm on the gEDA developer list, too, and they do not have this
> feature; rather than updating the references based in instantiation,
> they put the path in the netlist. We are, kinda, competing with
> them.. two free software products still competing! -- this would put
> us 'ahead' :) (In addition to all the work done on pcbnew.. and the
> fact we use c++ not vanilla c)

What do we get if we win, or capture the lead? If it was a real 
valuable prize, I might actually begin to feel like I was competing and 
do more. ;-)
Yes, the decision to use C is a curious one. There are folks who 
prefer to program on their hands and knees, or who have never looked up 
off the ground to see what they are doing. And some of those folks will 
tell you they are doing it the "right way", and actually believe it. 
Different strokes....
> thanks & sorry about the long email,
> Tim
>
> ps. Dick: I had some look at the visitor design pattern -- it looks
> cool 
It is a "directed visitor design pattern". I have not seen anything 
like it anywhere else. So I am inclined to hereby ordain it the 
"tourist" design pattern, because a tourist vists with a guide, whereas 
what visitor visits is not defined, but in the typicial visitor software 
design pattern it is usually "every destination".

Dick Hollenbeck
SoftPLC Corporation
http://softplc.com



> and i wanted to try to solve the GetScreen() issue without
> resorting to a 'virtual BASE_SCREEN*' (as this requires typcasting to
> any of the derived classes), but, I couldn't come up with any better
> solutions. :(