kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 08/03/18 18:45, Ouabache Designworks wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 9:21 AM, Tomasz Wlostowski
> <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx <mailto:tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Please, give me a single argument what benefits Kicad would get by
>     having a netlist generator as a separate program. I also asked you for
>     an example of a successful graphical editing application following 'the
>     unix way', but so far you've not answered my question. Does this mean
>     that there isn't any?
> 
>     Tom
> 
> 
> 
> EEschema is a schematic editor. You give it a schematic file, it edits
> that file and you save it. Nice simple tool.
> 
> Now you  want to tack on netlist exporting. Thats fine as long as the
> entire design is in one file but what do you do when you have a
> multisheet design?  Now you need a top sheet that contains the file
> names for all the other sheets. You have to parse out all those names,
> read those files into memory, interconnect them with the existing
> connections before writing out the netlist.  All this has nothing to do
> with editing schematics and should not be included in EEschema.

I don't see any problem with the way it's done today with multiple
sheets. The netlister starts with the root sheet and loads sub-sheets
when necessary. Making a netlist is so essential for PCB design that in
most modern packages (Kicad V5 included) it's not even visible to the user.

Imagine an audio workstation program requiring an external command line
tool just to mix down all the tracks and produce and MP3 file. Find me a
musician who would like to use it :)

> 
> 
> 
> To answer your question: I am not aware of any popular graphics editors
> that do strictly follow the unix way.

Me neither. The unix way was defined in early '70s, so it works well for
things that were invented in '70s: shell interpreters or compilers (not
all of them). If it worked well for graphical software, we would have
tons of proprietary applications following the unix principles with
crowds of happy users.


Tom