kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> 
> Even though it never got much attraction, I do like this tool here,
> 
> 
> http://www.dwheeler.com/dbus/
> 
> 
> and feel it would be a good tool to rely on if DBUS were to be added to 
> Kicad. The CIDL is cleaner than the "dbus introspective XML", yet a 
> person can generate the xml using this tool.

Dick,

It looks like an interesting tool but I noticed that this project is not
being actively developed. I don't know if that will be an issue or not.

> I am thinking that reading XML files as a human is not fun.

I always thought XML readability has been over hyped. There are much
easier file formats to read. Try reading a ODF or DOCX file sometime
just for fun. Of course there are many that are worse.

<<< snipped >>>

> The main point of the *.cidl files would be to *design* the interfaces 
> before coding anything. Also, this design would be valuable in any 
> future work within Kicad, if for no other reason than it would help with 
> the document existing and possible future document models.

I think this is the real strength of XML. It forces you to clearly
define your document model up front. If you get that part right, your
code is usually fairly simple. I have use XML in a few Python programs
and the code to read and write the files was very simple. All of the
complexity was in the document definition. The parsers do most of the
heavy lifting. I hope whatever you implement you can make it stream
based so that it will be more flexible than the current FILE/fprint
based design.

> This is something I am interested in. I also see it being dove-tailed 
> into a task involving a new file format and data tree for PCBNEW.
> 
> 
> I may have some time later in the year to start this. I am currently 
> bringing a new ARM board to market that was designed with Kicad.

Sounds interesting. It's been a while since I've had to do any embedded
design. I live in an analog world now. Enjoy your ARM project and I'll
be keeping my eye out for that new XML code later in the year.

Wayne

> 
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> Dick
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