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Date:	Thu, 28 Jan 2016 16:34:14 -0500
Message-Id:	<201601282134.u0SLYET7002642@envy.delorie.com>
From:	DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>
To:	geda-user AT delorie DOT com
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Subject:	Re: [geda-user] The nature of gEDA layers
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Reply-To:	geda-user AT delorie DOT com

> > - Allow more/all things inside Elements, on explicit layers.
> 
> This one in particular is not a small incremental step but a fairly
> drastic change.  A lot of work is likely to be required to fix all the
> points that make assumptions about Elements.  I'm not saying it's a
> bad idea, but it's hard.

Yeah, hard :-)  Internals-wise, the problems are many-fold:

* The GUI needs a way of letting the user specify a BBvia
* The GUI needs to be able to *draw* a BBvia (+1 in 3D mode)
* The GUI needs a way to let the user specify which layer pairs may have BBVias
* The exporters need to know how to export a BBVia (esp drill files)
* DRC needs BBVia-specific rules
* DRC needs to know where BBVias connect to
* Find, likewise
* Report, likewise
* auto-drc needs to know when to let you go "past" a BBVia
* ...which implies a real physical stackup is needed, and enforced
* ...which implies more GUI changes
* will autoroute use BBVias?
* what about the optimizers?
* We need a way of storing BBVias in a file
* ...and storing them internally
* ...and hooking them up to all the object-oriented code throughout
* ...and hooking them up to the rtrees
* ...and teaching rtrees how to find only BBVias that intersect the layers in question
* ...and define "layers in question" accordingly
* etc

So let's call this a "drastic incremental change" - it's doable in the
context of the current code set but it's a lot of work.

But enough talk.  Who's going to do all that work?

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