Mail Archives: geda-user/2013/04/02/15:52:59
Stefan Salewski wrote:
> For now I will try parsing direct from Ruby, Ruby is really good in
> RegExp processing. And I think chances are good that PCB's file format
> will never change any more...
I sincerely hope, that this is not true. Some highly desirable features
would require changes of the format. Think blind and burried vias,
generalized layers, footprints with letters, net classes, net aware
polygons, ...
> I have seen that kicad is using a similar text based file format like
> PCB, while Eagle seems to use bloat XML now.
XML does not necessarily mean bloat. This is much like C source code which
can by pretty cryptic but can also be very readable. IMHO, the main
benefit of a XML compliant format would be the availability of resilient
parsers in quite a number of circumstances. Lately, even the gnu version
of awk aquired XML parsing abilities (http://gawkextlib.sourceforge.net/ )
I'd say, the current file format of pcb is quite nice, concise and
appropriate for the current job. It "just" lacks the ability to be changed
in a backward compatible way. In some cases, the recently introduced
attributes can be used. But in other cases this does not work.
---<)kaimartin(>----
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