kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 14.02.2017 19:38, Jon Evans wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I want to get familiar with the GAL codebase, and it occurred to me that
> it might be fun to play with porting GerbView to GAL.  I know it is on
> the 6.x roadmap, but it seemed to me that it would be mostly not
> dependent on any other changes that I see on the roadmap or have seen
> people talking about on the mailing list.
> 
Hi Jon,

Many thanks for your involvement. I think working on a GAL port of
GerbView is a great idea, even though it's not planned (yet) for the
nearest release.

> - Is anyone currently working on this?

I don't think so.

> 
> - If a GAL port is "feature-complete", is there any reason for the app
> to retain the legacy graphics code, or can it just provide OpenGL and
> Cairo backends?  My impression is the only think keeping legacy canvas
> in pcbnew is feature differences between legacy and GAL, but I wanted to
> check if there are other reasons.

Except for printing mentioned by JP, there's no reason to keep legacy
drawing code. I'm quite sure, though, printing could be handled by
GAL-Cairo with some minor modifications.

> 
> - In my first hour of looking at the code for this, it seems like the
> GAL code currently has some interdependence with pcbnew that needs to be
> straightened out before using GAL in other applications.  For example,
> EDA_DRAW_PANEL_GAL depends on PCB_PAINTER, not a generic PAINTER.  Is
> this an open problem for anyone to tackle, or does anyone actively have
> plans to refactor this?

It's an obvious mistake, EDA_DRAW_PANEL_GAL should depend on the base
PAINTER class, and the PCB_PAINTER should be created in the
PCB_DRAW_PANEL_GAL. Would you be able to fix this?

Cheers,
Tom