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From: Kai-Martin Knaak <knaak AT iqo DOT uni-hannover DOT de>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Still Struggling with PCB's Import Feature
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:40:49 +0100
Organization: Institut =?UTF-8?B?ZsO8cg==?= Quantenoptik
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Gus Fantanas wrote:

> My library problems went away only after I
> declared the local footprint library to pcb from the GUI
> (File-->Preferences-->Library).  So, it seems to me that my version of
> pcb does not care about '$HOME/.pcb/settings'.

On start-up, the GTK-GUI looks at $HOME/.pcb/preferences. On close, the 
GTK-GUI writes its current values to the preferences file. It only looks 
at $HOME/.pcb/settings if it does not find a value in the preference file.
Because of this, settings in the settings file affect pcb if they are 
either not set by the GUI at all, or if the GUI had not been run before.

Yes, this causes a bit of confusion. I have been fooled by this more than 
once, too. It is aggravated by the fact, that some of the values set in 
the preferences dialog of the GUI are stored in the layout file rather 
than in the preferences file. IMHO, the whole preference/settings business 
could use a clean-up. It should be transparent to the user, where a 
setting is stored. Ideally, this could be chosen in the GUI.

How about this:

Every setting is associated with a flag which can assume one of several 
states:
a) "s" = system default -- default value read from system config
b) "u" = user preference -- is read from/stored in $HOME/.pcb/preference
c) "p" = project dir -- is read from/stored in a $PWD/pcb-preference
d) "l" = layout -- is read from / gets stored in the *.pcb file

Very much like gschem pcb would read a), b), c), d) on start-up. Settings 
stored in the layout take precedence over settings in preference files, 
which overwrite system setting.

Flags and settings would be stored in attributes in the *.pcb file.

Any comments?

---<)kaimartin(>---