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Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2015 13:43:03 +0100
From: "Stephen R. van den Berg (srb AT cuci DOT nl) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
To: "Peter Clifton (petercjclifton AT googlemail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] A fileformat library
Message-ID: <20151224124303.GA22838@cuci.nl>
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Peter Clifton (petercjclifton AT googlemail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>The flip side, and a point that is hopefully still compatible with this
>view - is that for some tasks, _having_ to hand edit the data file means
>that our gui is failing (badly).

True in some cases.
But sometimes you need to do something awkward and time consuming that
is possible to describe in a few sentences, but a nightmare to do in any
GUI.

This even happens to me on databases at times.  Ever tried to migrate a 
Wordpress site to a different domainname?  Easiest way is to get an SQL ASCII
dump, then do find-replace on it, then reload the database.

With regard to gschem and pcb; it would be trivial to throw everything into
an SQL schema, and then write an exporter and importer from SQL to the existing
fileformats and back.  When you then extend the structure in SQL which the
exporter/importer don't understand, you either live with the fact that you
lose information when you export/import it, or you extend the exporter/importer
as well to support the new structures.
-- 
Stephen.