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Date:	Tue, 17 Mar 2015 09:03:11 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Frank Miles <fpm AT u DOT washington DOT edu>
To:	geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: [geda-user] pcb alternatives
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On Tue, 17 Mar 2015, ????????? ?????? wrote:

> Hello, now I'm trying gEDA and I like it, but I absolutely can't understand PCB, is another script like gsch2pcb to convert my schemes for something else
> like pcbnew from kicad?

While in the distant past I had some success with PCB, more recently
my attempted use was a failure.  I had the proper netlist (from gschem),
and part shapes; but I couldn't use PCB's schematic import function
due to some post-schematic customizations.  For reasons I couldn't
determine, the netlist import was only partly successful and I was
unable to fix the problem - seeming locked up in a bad state.  I went
through several tutorials, trying to determine what magical key
sequence was necessary to continue past the block, but to no avail.
{This is with the PCB from debian/testing}

So while I was predisposed to PCB, I tried kicad.  There's an amazing
demo:
 	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHDAHpR5Ls
that convinced me that I should try it.  At this point I've only done
one board with it, and while it definitely has its quirks and limitations,
I was able to resolve the issues that I ran into.  This was made easier
by having generated custom footprints using some code that could produce
either PCB or Kicad footprints from one source:
 	http://dlharmon.com/geda/footgen.html .

I have a custom netlist generator that produces kicad-compatible netlists
from my gschem schematics.  It's part of a larger bit of software that
would be completely impractical for anyone else to run, so I've been
thinking of writing a scheme backend for gnetlist so others could try
kicad's 'pcbnew'.  After all, kicad is GPLv2 - and gnetlist can produce
netlists for Eagle and many other non-GPL board layout packages.  Would
this seem the act of some kind of traitor?

{BTW - Kicad doesn't seem quite as open as they might about netlist formats;
but if you install their schematic package it's easy to see that one
of their accepted formats is essentially the same as the very old OrCAD
pcb netlist format, with a truncated header block}

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