Mail Archives: geda-user/2012/07/05/13:41:13
On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 12:16:14PM +0200, Gabriel Paubert wrote:
>
> I have appended a second version of the patch; the only difference
> with the first one is that now the line in the header that starts
> with "G04 PCB-dimensions" now specifies the dimensions either in
> metric or in imperial dimensions depending on the metric option.
>
> I was expecting that the developers with git write access
> would be a bit more reactive and tell me whether something
> looked wrong with the patch. I must admit I'm not completely
> satisfied with the names of some functions/variables, but I'm
> not too worried since they are local to the gerber.c file. For
> global names, I'm much fussier.
>
The patch is as well-done as it could be. I considered doing
it a while back, but was turned off by all the if-statements
necessary. Thanks for finally biting the bullet!
Unfortunately, I don't recall enough about the Gerber spec
to review your patch, nor to address your other concerns. I
might push it through when I get a free moment anyway, assuming
it doesn't break the old behavior.
> From my limited tests, the patch does not affect the Gerber
> code in imperial mode (diff output only lists the obvious:
> timestamp in the header, and the board dimensions in the
> second version of the patch, in any case only the comments
> are affected).
>
Does tests/run_tests.sh still pass?
> Now there is still one thing I question: it is the logic
> that generates the aperture code. A long time ago, pcb reused
> aperture codes between layers. Now it uses a separate aperture
> space for every layer, which does not make much sense to me.
>
> Especially troublesome is the fact that the drill size numbers
> are extracted from the same space as the aperture numbers, which
> leads to unnnecessarily large numbers: in my last board I have
> drill numbers 100, 101, and 102. However, the description of
> tool selection from http://www.excellon.com/manuals/program.htm
> indicates that you should not have more than 2 digits, since
> when there are more than 2, the last two are interpreted as a
> "compensation index", whatever that means (it's not my domain).
> Gerbv interprets the tool definitions as I want, but it might
> be a bug which results in a DWIM behaviour.
>
> My conclusion is that at least the drill bits should be defined
> starting from one. For the photoplotter layer, I'm still unconvinced
> about the convenience of the current behaviour.
>
> Of course, this is open source, so why not make it configurable?
> The three options would be:
> 1) start from D11 for each layer (overlapping spaces),
> 2) use a single global aperture space (reusing the same apertures
> codes on different layers)
> 3) use non overlapping aperture spaces (current behaviour)
>
> Question to developers: would a patch that fixes the drill bit
> numbering problem described above be considered for inclusion?
>
I would expect so. I don't like the huge drill numbers for purely
asthetic reasons.
--
Andrew Poelstra
Email: asp11 at sfu.ca OR apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
Web: http://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew
"You shouldn't trust every quote you read on the Internet." -- Socrates
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