I've been using KiCad for a n= umber of years now, and am considering
moving to a new EDA suite - gEDA looks like a good candidate. In fact
when choosing an EDA suite back then, KiCad and gEDA were the only
realistic options as far as I could see.

I have been u= sing gschem for years and am now starting to also use kicad. My experience = has only been with schematics and not PCB layout but I suspect that kicad w= ill have a better PCB editor. That assumption is based on organizations lik= e CERN announcing that they use kicad and contribute to the code base.

Gschem is a=A0 better schematic capture tool than eeschema. Some = of it may be that I am used to gschem but I find eeschema hard to use. Oper= ations that are trivial in gschem are painful in eeschema. Human factors is= both engineering and art and geda has done a better job.

Some parts of kicad are "weird". They show examples of = "Hierarchy" but from what I can tell it is really a case of macro= expansion.

My goal is to work with both geda and kicad an= d create tools so that you could use either one for IC design.=A0 Forty yea= rs ago schematic capture tools were used for both IC and PCB designs. IC de= sign moved away decades ago because schematic capture tools simply could no= t handle the "Big Data" issues that IC's generate. I plan on = creating tools to handle these issues that could translate between an IC de= sign database=A0 and either geda or kicad databases. This would actually le= t you use=A0 either projects schematic tool with the others PCB layout. I w= ill keep this list posted as I progress.

John Eaton

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 7:04 AM, Michai Ramakers <m DOT ramakers AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

Hello,

[ I post this in 'geda-user' instead of 'geda-help' because= answers
might not be short or simple, and might not benefit new users ]

I've been using KiCad for a number of years now, and am considering
moving to a new EDA suite - gEDA looks like a good candidate. In fact
when choosing an EDA suite back then, KiCad and gEDA were the only
realistic options as far as I could see.

Reasons for looking for a KiCad-alternative are subjective, and
basically boil down to KiCad not being mature enough to use in a
production-environment. (This is my opinion, not a request for
flaming.)

Before wading through docs and giving it a serious try, I'd like to
ask here whether gEDA could provide what I'm looking for in a EDA
suite; 'yes', 'no' or more elaborate replies are more than = welcome.

- runs Linux/*BSD (I use NetBSD mostly)

- is stable and mature - no drastic sudden changes in workflow or
file-format or similar

- uses plaintext file-format for interchange between suite-components

- comes with complete and detailed documentation - that includes
file-format details, so I can script against that, and these scripts
will continue to work over releases

- has a coherent project-website (or rather, one-stop source of
information, not scattered throughout the web)

I think that for most of these, it is easy to say whether gEDA
qualifies or not, but comments and mentions of corner-cases are
welcome.

Furthermore, it would be nice to have a proper auto-router. I was
impressed by the '= freerouting.net' autorouter, and read various mails
about gEDA interfacing to the input-/output-formats that
freerouting.net su= pports, with no definitive answer. I suppose I'd
have to test the gEDA internal autorouter to know how it compares to
the freerouting.net one (or not?).

Thank you in advance,
with kind regards,

Michai