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Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 19:22:56 +0200 (CEST)
From: Roland Lutz <rlutz AT hedmen DOT org>
To: "Edward Hennessy (ehennes AT sbcglobal DOT net) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: [geda-user] Plans for gEDA/gaf (was: [OT] ngspice integration in KiCad)
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On Fri, 29 Jul 2016, Edward Hennessy (ehennes AT sbcglobal DOT net) [via 
geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> What are your plans for the gEDA-gaf codebase? It looks like your are 
> rewriting the core library in other languages. Is your plan to make 
> libgeda obsolete?

I'd like to have a core library--call it libgeda, call it something 
else--which is used by the gEDA programs and which can be used in other 
programs and scripts, as well.  This library should provide an object 
model and functions for accessing it, for reading and writing files, for 
rendering objects, and so on.  The idea is that no application or tool 
working with gEDA files should have to duplicate basic gEDA functionality.

The current libgeda doesn't live up to that.  While in theory, you could 
use it in another program for loading gEDA files, in practice, it's so 
intertwined with gEDA and especially gschem internals that in most cases, 
it's easier to just duplicate the required behavior.  I'd like to move the 
parts of libgeda which are interesting to use as a library out into a new 
library which is used both by libgeda and the tools, merge libgeda back 
into gschem, and have the new library take the place of libgeda.

My other concern is the scriptability of gEDA.  While gEDA does have an 
embedded Guile interpreter and makes some functionality available to it, 
this approach is somewhat limited; most notably, you can't use the gEDA 
API from a stand-alone script or from a script running within another 
application.  I'd prefer having bindings to the core library available in 
a high-level language and using these both for stand-alone scripts and for 
code which is run within an application.  This way, the core library could 
also contain commonly used functionality which is more naturally written 
in a high-level language, like the netlister.