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Re: [RFC/PATCH] Generic utility tool

 

On 19/01/2019 15:30, John Beard wrote:
> A very gentle bump here. I'm thinking about a utility to assist in
> debugging/benchmarking/testing/developing DRC routines (currently
> working on some DRC unit testing, but the testing utils are easily
> re-used into a small utility-style executable).

Hi John,

It's going to be a very useful tool. I wrote similar tests in the past
for the P&S and connectivity (and GAL and some other things too), but
they remain in my private branches because they're too low quality IMHO
to be published, so I doubly appreciate your efforts to develop a proper
testing tool. Also, I don't think the tests need to be 100% usable on
all the platforms we support at all times, I found most of their value
comes from much easier instrumentation/reproduction of difficult bugs or
optimizing complex algorithms (i.e. DRC) without messing with the GUI.

Concerning the link time (I'm not sure I understood you correclty), I
used to link my tests directly against _pcbnew.kiface (with a custom
makefile and changed symbol visibility in the main makefile) and only
rebuilt the ._kiface DLL when I changed something inside it. This is of
course not very portable/error-proof, but reduces link times a lot. In
the long term, we should split these huge .kiface beasts into a more
manageable set of DLLs.

Cheers,
Tom


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