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From: Markus Hitter <mah AT jump-ing DOT de>
Subject: Re: [geda-help] Best way to make Power Pins explicitly visible
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:49:44 +0200
To: geda-help AT delorie DOT com
Reply-To: geda-help AT delorie DOT com
Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com
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Am 28.06.2013 um 19:02 schrieb John Doty:

> Unfortunately, everybody's flow is a little different.

Yes, this is indeed unfortunate. Lots of wasted time and knowledge.

> Small project approaches don't scale well to big projects, while  
> big project fussiness gets in the way of small projects.

Good approaches can deal with both. In CAD, drawing a cube in low end  
FreeCAD is about the same procedure as in high end Catia. Actually, I  
consider a low entry barrier to be one of the most important features  
of software today.

Such things aren't that difficult: shine on the prefered workflow and  
get rid of the rest.

Prominent examples: we still have these m4 footprints, just confusing  
people. We have a dozen footprint editors, but no one integrated.  
gschem has different default mouse handling than pcb and both have it  
different from standard applications. Part symbols have neither  
simulation data nor footprint choices, you have to know how to change  
that. And so on.

Most of this stuff exists, because people have developed different  
habits and they have these habits because the software allows to keep  
them. Contrary to many developers I consider this diversity to be a  
bad thing.

> The power of the toolkit approach is that it can accommodate all  
> this diversity reasonably well. But that requires that users take  
> some initiative, learn the capabilities of the tools, and expect  
> that the cookbook tutorials will need some interpretation to work  
> in their own flow.

Yes, and this required learning curve is the wasteful, unproductive  
part. Because these efforts would be much better invested in the task  
actually to be done: designing a schematics, simulating a circuit,  
drawing a layout.

Before you cringe about flexibility, please look at Linux' 2D  
printing as an example: normal users can just click the "print"  
button and get a sheet of paper printed. Expert users can dive into  
the chain of tools, replace or modify parts of them and get exactly  
the arrangement of pixels they want. Pretty good example where  
newbies are just as productive as experts.


Umh, the initial question was about the lack of documentation ...  
well, if software needs more documentation than tooltips in the GUI  
and comments in the source code, there's something wrong with this  
software, so having no documentation is entirely fine. IMO, of course.


Markus

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Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/