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Subject: Re: [geda-user] The state of gEDA/gaf (Was gEDA/PCBs diversity, Was: Pin hole size)
From: John Doty <jpd AT noqsi DOT com>
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Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:56:59 -0600
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On Oct 26, 2012, at 8:20 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On 10/26/2012 10:13 PM, John Doty wrote:
>> 
>> On Oct 26, 2012, at 7:55 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
>> 
>>> On 10/26/2012 09:47 PM, DJ Delorie wrote:
>>>>> an ugly bug-prone kludge if pasted atop gschem's ancient foundation.
>>>> 
>>>> Please try to use less emotionally charged terms in the future.
>>> 
>>> Yeah really.  Gschem's foundation can't be THAT "ancient", if it's
>>> using modern GTK stuff.  And I have to say, as someone who uses it most
>>> every day, the thing works great.
>> 
>> Its integration with gtk is not comfortable. It does work great as is, but trying to torque it into something more modern makes little sense. Another problem is that the Guile scripting is pasted on rather than truly built in, so it hasn't been very effective.
> 
>  Understood.  Is it possible to "rework" the GTK integration such that
> it's more "natural" for a GTK app?  I mean, I realize that it's NOT a
> GTK app, but still...at least for the GTK HID.

Possible, yes. But it would be an exercise in mismatched design.

For the HETE-1 space mission payload, we used a commercial POSIX OS. It was a serious mismatch to the needs of our distributed, embedded system, and caused a number of problems. After the HETE-1 launcher failure (not a software problem), I insisted that we replace the OS with a custom system for HETE-2. I encountered a lot of resistance from the team, so I just started writing one. At that point, our software lead ripped it out of my hands, and turned it into a gem of simplicity and efficiency. The entire OS was simpler than the messy glue code the HETE-1 application needed to make the POSIX system usable. HETE-2 was a great success.

Yes, you *can* start with an architecture that's a mismatch to your problem, and patch things up so they work. But that's a hard way to do it, and the results are likely to be buggy, sub-optimal and difficult to maintain.

I don't want to have to deal with the fallout of incrementally turning gschem into a real gtk application. But I might very well switch to a gtkschem designed as a gtk application from the start.
 
John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd AT noqsi DOT com