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Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2017 06:37:19 +0100 (CET)
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
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From: gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu
Subject: [geda-user] Announcing EDAKrill, a footprint/symbol/* sharing service
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

Hi all,

I'm proud to announce a new project and service, EDAkrill. The main
characteristics are:

  - share footprints, symbols, scripts

  - EDA-neutral (uploads are converted to different formats)

  - tag based user specified meta-data, parametric search

  - tags are community defined key=value pairs

  - dual svn and web interfaces (soon: integration in pcb-rnd)

  - web users can upload using the web


The service is accessible at http://repo.hu/projects/edakrill
I invite all geda users to join, register and upload resources.
Feedback, opinions, suggestions are welcome (and are weighted by
contribution).

The project is still heavily under development, a lot of features
are missing (e.g. we don't convert symbols, only footprints, the
web service is incomplete, the symbol preview rendering is not
perfect yet).

Comparison to gedasymbols

Most of you are familiar with gedasymbols.org and probably would
ask the obvious question: why start an alternative service? The
answer is that EDAkrill is different on some important details:

1. tool-neutral: it's not a geda-centric service; pcb-rnd inspired
the idea that we can easily convert footprints from and to a
growing number of formats

2. tagging: users will be able to add and edit tags of any
resource. The list and meaning of tag names and tag values are
decided by the users (see also: openstreetmap.org). Searches are
based on these tags, not on file names or the file hierarchy in SVN

3. allow upload from the web so casual users who want to publish
only a few files a time won't need to learn a VCS; I have plans
to have integrated footprint upload from pcb-rnd - the modular
infrastructure and already existing wget footprint engine make it easy

Comparison to edacore

By now, we've implemented working porotypes of two important elements
of edacore, as alternative projects:

1. tEDAx, a cheap-to-implement file format for exchanging data

2. EDAkrill, a service to host/share data

What we won't have, compared to the edacore idea (as far as I
understood edacore from the sparse material available):

  - a central software library or any attempt to reduce code duplication
among totally different projects

  - internal model unification, any attempt to replace native file formats

  - a single central service for sharing data; my intention is that
EDAkrill is one of the services available, not the One True Service
everyone should use

  - no integration of tEDAx and EDAkrill; developers and users can
decide to use any one or both, they are independent components

NOTE: since these project are very young, we need some time to get them adopted
by more EDA tools.

Regards,

Igor2