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Subject: Re: [geda-user] identical symbol names
From: Stefan Salewski <mail AT ssalewski DOT de>
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Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 23:00:34 +0100
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On Mon, 2014-03-10 at 00:40 +0400, Алексей Харьковский wrote:
> > The problem with all these ideas is that they make schematics less
> > reusable.
> >
> Disagree.
> Problems depends not on ideas but on their implementation.

Assume you have a symbol which includes a link to a PDF Datasheet.
The link may change.

If you have references to symbols in your schematics, you only have to
modify the PDF entry in your symbol. But if you include a copy of your
symbol in all of your schematic files, you have to modify all copies.
(Yes, that can be done automatically.)

My personally feeling is, that references generally generate less
trouble.

Yes, they can generate trouble:
1. When you have an untrusted source (for this problem you should make a
local backup copy.)

2. When there exist different sources with the same name. For this case
you can insert more data into the symbol, i.e. authors name and version
number.

My feeling is, that in the academic world references are the way of
choice. In your master or PhD thesis you generally give references to
the books and papers you have used, you do not provide a full copy. Or
do you copy articles from Wikipedia to your local computer? I think not
in general case -- but there may be exceptions, i.e. if that article es
very important or you have no online access for a while.

Long time ago I suggested that gschem should store a checksum for each
referenced symbol, so changes of that symbol can be detected. I still
think that that is a good idea. Further gschem could save some fields,
i.e. author and version. So if it becomes unclear which symbol the
schematic is referencing, there is some information available to decide.

I agree that for some cases copies of symbols are preferable. Some
people like self-contained documents, i.e files of a word processor
which includes all pictures. Other people, like LaTeX users, often have
pictures separate from main text document. Generally, when a project
contains multiple files, something like a tar-archive is convenient to
put all together.