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Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 18:27:47 +0200 (CEST)
From: Roland Lutz <rlutz AT hedmen DOT org>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: [geda-user] gnetlist refactoring completed
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.11.1508201615080.31048@nimbus>
User-Agent: Alpine 2.11 (DEB 23 2013-08-11)
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

Hi,

I finally finished my work on refactoring gnetlist.  The result is a new, 
improved netlister which behaves almost identical to gnetlist and passes 
the original gnetlist test suite, but is much easier to extend.

In contrast to the first development version I posted on the list, the 
final refactored version's output is slightly different from that of 
gnetlist.  The exact differences are documented in tests/netlist/README.

You can clone the repository from

     git://github.com/rlutz/xorn.git

or download the latest tarball from:

     http://hedmen.org/xorn/xorn-netlist-20150820.tar.gz

There are two noteworthy differences in the way the netlister behaves:
   * Attribute conflicts are now considered an error.  This will usually 
cause the netlister to fail on larger schematic since there are often 
unnoticed inconsistencies, but it will succeed once the inconsistencies 
are fixed.
   * Ports can now appear multiple times in a subschematic, or not at all. 
This will still cause a warning but produces the expected result.

Since the new code doesn't run any Scheme code or read any configuration 
file, it is not a drop-in replacement for gnetlist.  You will usually have 
to add your configuration as command-line options to the Xorn invocation. 
If, for example, you are using the standard library, no special symbols or 
hierarchy, and are using your distribution's gEDA package, this would be:

     xorn netlist --symbol-library-search=/usr/share/gEDA/sym -g BACKEND schematic.sch

You can run the Xorn command without installing it first.  To do so, just 
run the `xorn' executable from `src/command' directory in the build tree 
or add that directory to your PATH.

If you are interested in writing a netlist backend, the obvious starting 
point would be looking at the existing backends:

     https://github.com/rlutz/xorn/tree/master/src/backend

The API documentation is available at:

     http://hedmen.org/xorn/doc/api/html/namespacexorn_1_1geda_1_1netlist.html

If you want to use the netlister in your own application, see the 
documentation for xorn.geda.netlist.netlist.

Roland