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Date: Wed, 3 May 2023 05:28:13 +0200 (CEST)
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
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From: "grnd AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: [geda-user] new schematics editor and new EDA suite: sch-rnd and Ringdove
 (intro)
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

Hi all,

I've subscribed again, for a week or two, to announce the first stable 
release of a new open source schematics editor software and the 
corresponding EDA suite, and to answer questions about them. (I will unsub 
after that; the main reason I post this here is that I originally 
announced the effort, then called cschem, here, years ago.)

I will post two separate emails, one about the details of sch-rnd 
(schematics editor), the other one is about the details of Ringdove (EDA 
suite).

If you are 100% happy with gEDA, gschem/lepton-eda, pcb and gerbv, it's 
safe to stop reading here and to ignore all 3 posts. 

If you ever had thoughts about "why can't we have more similar GUIs in 
gschem and pcb and gerbv" or had a broken guile after a system upgrade and 
wondered whether sch-editing could be done without guile then you should 
probably read these posts.

This mail is about the generic consequences of having a new schematics 
editor and a new EDA suite. The EDA suite, called Ringdove EDA, cosists of 
a few separate projects, most notably: sch-rnd for schematics capture, 
pcb-rnd for board edit and camv-rnd for gerber(-and more) viewing. 

I am the maintainer of a PCB editor, pcb-rnd, for about 10 years already. 
That was my starting point, the Ringdove EDA suite slowly grew around 
pcb-rnd as a set of separate, but well coordinated projects.

Sch-rnd completes the input side of the workflow: before that, I had a 
problem of what sch editor to recommend to new users. pcb-rnd can work 
from a lot of formats/editors, but for historical reasons most 
tutorials/doc/long-time-users would use gschem or lepton-eda to feed 
pcb-rnd. But I personally found gschem/lepton suboptimal so I didn't like 
to recommend them to new users. Sch-rnd is my attempt to offer a 
schematics editor that I can really recommend to users.

The major conceptual novelty is that I managed to bust some myths by using 
a very different approach in the basic design of sch-rnd and Ringdove. 
These are new balances, for example between toolkit approach and 
integration, but I believe not by a bad compromise, but by strengthening 
both. (Technical details will follow in those other two posts.) 

In other words, I really liked some of the fundamental design decisions in 
gEDA, and found it superior to the design in KiCAD and many proprietary 
EDA systems. However, there were also a few design decisions that I found 
wrong but unchangeable. So what I am trying to do with Ringdove is taking 
the good ideas from gEDA, push them even further a bit while leaving out 
the ideas I think really block gEDA from exploiting the full potential of 
the good ideas.


So what does sch-rnd and Ringdove mean to pcb-rnd? Not less, but more 
options and flexibility! I definitely won't cut support of gschem/lepton 
schematics/netlists (but I will direct new pcb-rnd users to sch-rnd 
obviously). At the moment it doesn't, but in theory sch-rnd could support 
geda/pcb too, on it's output (although this is a very low priority idea). 


Best regards,

Igor2