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Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2016 15:34:28 -0500
Message-Id: <201601052034.u05KYSuc032326@envy.delorie.com>
From: DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
In-reply-to: <0254E441-E74C-490E-BFF0-DD0BED19F2B2@noqsi.com> (message from
	John Doty on Tue, 5 Jan 2016 15:10:34 -0500)
Subject: Re: [geda-user] A fileformat library
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> But for gEDA, it's a small overhead relative to everything else,
> especially if it allows you to use old-fashioned kilobyte tools
> rather than trendy megabyte tools for processing.

Schematics have less info in them than layouts, so sure.  Layout files
tend to grow significantly bigger so the overhead becomes more
significant.  Until now, we've been letting processing and I/O
performance keep up with our bandwidth needs, but the balance might
tip at any time.

Plus, a more complex data structure makes text-based tools harder to
use, as they don't follow the structure with enough context to be
reliable.  PCB intentionally makes the output file format
text-friendly but most scripts which read PCB files *cannot* read
"just any" PCB files.

As for kilobyte vs megabyte tools, I think you're just making that up
- and once again choosing emotionally charged terms where they're
totally superfluous.  A perl script that imports a yaml library is
going to be significantly shorter than a perl script that has to parse
a schematic file manually.  The benefits depend heavily on the
implementation and the functional requirements.

> But, at least for me, "diff" is pretty common on schematics. It's
> easy to spot attribute and symbol changes in a diff. Diff is also
> part of my layout vs schematic checks using Osmond PCB.

A simple binary-to-ascii converter is all that's required to support
such tasks, much like SQL databases can export to a text file.  But,
using diff that way could be a crutch to let us defer creating better
tools for comparing iterations of designs.  If diffing schematic files
didn't work, we'd probably have a better schematic-comparison tool by
now.