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Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 20:45:41 +0100
From: Gabriel Paubert <paubert AT iram DOT es>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Find rat lines
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On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 07:19:00PM +0000, Peter Clifton wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-12-04 at 22:04 +0100, Gabriel Paubert wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 06:33:05PM +0100, Levente Kovacs wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I experience that in recent PCB (git HEAD) pressing the F key doesn't
> > > highlight the unrouted rat lines.
> > > 
> > > Does anyone else experience this?
> > 
> > Yes, this is commit 764c3560a722c768a7048f5c70811ec363862882 
> > from Peter Clifton.
> 
> 
> Yes - a deliberate change, and one which I'm going to review, as it does
> affect this usage to discover rat connections. There may be a better
> compromise than reverting the previous behaviour.
> 
> 
> > I'm not really sure that this is a good idea. From teh log
> > message, this caused a mistake in a board of the patch's author.
> 
> User-error (by me) caused the mistake, but the connectivity scan in PCB
> was not very helpful in discovering the problem!
> 
> 
> > However, why not do like the lesstif HID and put the number of rats
> > line left in the status line? Or why not use a different color for
> > highlighting rats and copper when pressing the F key.
> 
> That would not solve the issue. The problem I was trying to deal with
> relates to misleading output when hitting "F" on some copper belonging
> to a net which contains a short to a different net.)

I believed that some highlights had different colors when there
was a short. I just tested on one recently completed board and
some pads are highlighted in orange when I short 2 nets.

I also always use the message log window at the end to see the 
"The layout is complete and has no shorted nets" message (from 
the "O" command). Maybe this information should be made more
"graphical".

Why not put a warning also when exporting to Gerber or other if
the layout still has "issues" (non zero count of rats as a first
approximation)?


> The "F" tool would proclaim that completely isolated copper areas were
> connected. Our short-handling is not very good at the moment!

I think that the "F" tool works fine. As long as you know that
there are rats left.

Now I agree that finding where the short is when there is one
is a bit of a nightmare.

	Gabriel