On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 3:26 PM, John Doty <jpd@= noqsi.com> wrote:

On Jan 2, 2016, at 5:04 PM, Roland Lutz <rlutz AT hedmen DOT org> wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Dec 2015, Peter Clifton (petercjclifton AT googlemail DOT com) [via
> geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wr= ote:
>> Getting the data model right is almost completely independent of t= he rest - even if some may work more elegantly than others.
>>
>> Getting the data model right is also the hard bit - unfortunately.=
>
> I absolutely agree.=C2=A0 I've been working hard to get the in-mem= ory data representation for Xorn right, and the main thing which keeps me f= rom defining PCB object types right now is that I haven't found a convi= ncing data model for these yet.
>
> On Sun, 27 Dec 2015, Britton Kerin (britton DOT kerin AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>> Simple though it is, the effort of parsing it is not zero and is m= ostly a waste.=C2=A0 Modern language have built-in serialization, and with = YAML you get a cross-language version of that plus a well-defined human-rea= dable file format.=C2=A0 What's not to like?
>
> The part of parsing a .sym/.sch file which can potentially become easi= er with YAML is as simple as a sscanf(3).

Except that what we have is already easy to parse with sscanf() and = other things. We have a lot of infrastructure based on what we have: symbol= generators, refdes renumberers, ...

As I've m= entioned previously I'm talking pcb, which is a more painful format to = parse (such that so far as I'm aware the parser in pcb is the only one)= .=C2=A0 Personally I find formats like this:

=C2=A0 device=3DRESISTO= R
=C2=A0 T 44400 49300 5 10 1 1 90 0 1

substantially less readabl= e than ones with field names, but they are indeed easy to parse.=C2=A0 The = pcb format is quite a bit more elaborate and the savings from not rolling y= our own parser are more significant.

=C2=A0

>=C2=A0 After extracting the value strings from the file, you still have= parse and validate them no matter whether they have been stored in a .sym/= .sch or YAML file.

True.=C2=A0 One of the n= utty things about XML as people tried to use it was the notion that it can = somehow validate the data.=C2=A0 Trying to do that just causes schizophreni= a about where validation should happen and I wouldn't attempt it.=C2=A0= That needs an API like libgeda.=C2=A0 However, a lot of potential applicat= ion may just want to get the file parsed, and trust themselves to make some= valid modifications.=C2=A0 This can fairly easily be provided.=C2=A0 If Xo= rn later supersedes direct use of YAML with a full validating load/save for= the language in question, wonderful.

I think you're criteria fo= r what should go in libgeda are spot-on btw.=C2=A0 Nor do I have any proble= m with a C interface calling python or gschem or for that matter C++.=C2=A0= I do think providing a clean C interface to libgeda gets by far the best r= eturn on investment, since it's so widely known and with a little care = wrappers can then be provided almost automatically for a wide variety of la= nguages (via SWIG or some other similar mechanism -- or maybe Xorn facilita= tes this, I'm a little unclear).
=C2=A0
Britton