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Subject: Re: [geda-user] Buttons for automation (obligatory grab at our shared 3rd rail) Re: [geda-user] Antifork
From: John Doty <jpd AT noqsi DOT com>
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Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 21:03:03 -0400
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On Aug 24, 2015, at 8:33 PM, DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com> wrote:

> 
>> Adding features to a simple tool does not make it easier to use.
> 
> Except we don't have a simple tool, we have *many* simple tools.  The
> large number of tools causes its own complexity.  And we've seen that
> new users find "the toolkit way" to be difficult to learn

That’s your perception. To be sure, there will be a faction that will have that trouble, but that’s not a good reason to work against those who do *better* with a toolkit. KiCAD covers the integrated tool space: gEDA should not be “me too”, but “here’s an approach you may find better”.

> because it's
> not obvious how all the parts work together

But it’s worse with a complex tool, because then it’s harder to figure out the interactions of all of the features. At least with a toolkit there are interfaces. That disciplines the interactions.

> - There's too much
> complexity to absorb.
> 
> Managing the relationships between tools, and encapsulating the
> overall tasks we want to accomplish, is a neccessary part of using a
> toolkit - it's no different than writing a shell script or makefile to
> coordinate all the unixy tools.  If the nature of this encapsulation
> and scripting is a button in a gui, that's only natural for a
> gui-centric tool, just like a shell script is natural for a
> command-line tool.
> 

That forces everything to be GUI-centric, which makes all of those things for which a GUI is not natural harder. That was precisely the trouble I had with Viewlogic and the trouble I’m having with Vivado.

> If we look at the extreme of simplicity - that adding features is
> never good - we wouldn't have emacs or vi, we'd only have cat (or
> maybe toggle switches, if you didn't like manually moving wires
> around).  We wouldn't have email clients, we'd only have telnet (I
> hope you memorized the SMTP protocol).

The user should have the choice. There is a place for Apple-style totalitarian integration. I’m typing this at Mail on a Mac. But at least the way I use mail the inflexibility is acceptable. For EDA, it’s not.

>  The tools that make up the
> gEDA suite are, in essence, no more than text editors with lots of
> features added - there's nothing you can do in gEDA that you can't do
> with a good text editor and a lot of thinking, but using gEDA makes it
> easier.
> 

But much of it is graphical, and a GUI is the right tool for graphics. That doesn’t make it the right tool for the whole job, though.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd AT noqsi DOT com