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Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2018 08:15:46 +0200 (CEST)
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To: "Nicklas Karlsson (nicklas DOT karlsson17 AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
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From: gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu
Subject: indicating shorts, mincut, apollon - geda-user archeology (was: Re:
 shorted pads and the netlist in PCB --> netlist difference)
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On Wed, 11 Jul 2018, gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu wrote:

> There was a long discussion about this issue on the mailing list years ago, 
> some time between 2011 and 2013.

Hah, I've found it! It was late 2012. Let's see some archeology.

The thread started here:

http://www.delorie.com/archives/browse.cgi?p=geda-user/2012/12/04/12:35:10

of course this simple bugreport got derailed and quickly escalated into a 
haystack of random ideas on short circuit indication. I found it hard to 
follow all the ideas with the same subject line, so I decided to organize 
them. This was an early version of my summary on all proposals:

http://www.delorie.com/archives/browse.cgi?p=geda-user/2012/12/14/05:38:19

This was my proposal for mincut, backed up with prototype code:

http://www.delorie.com/archives/browse.cgi?p=geda-user/2012/12/13/09:27:49



And the rest of the story: for a while it got positive feedback from pcb 
devs, but then we bumped into "ok, but we first need to rewrite [some API 
and code in] find.c". None of the other proposals got any prototype or 
production code from anyone, as far as I can tell. I leaned back waiting 
for the said find.c rewrite.

So let's see what happened to mincut, the only proposal that had a 
prototype:

Time went by and nothing happened. I eventually forked and added mincut in 
pcb-rnd without any major find.c rewrite - so I stopped pushing it in 
mainline. (Although before 2016 I invested a lot of time doing my pcb-rnd 
development in a way mainline could apply the patches. Looking back, 
seeing the result, I think this was a pure waste of time)

This adventure with mincut was very useful for pcb-rnd: it helped me 
realize how important it is to modularize the code (happend to pcb-rnd in 
from 2013, by now we have less code in core than in plugins) so that 
features can be implemented in core plugins with minimal impact on core. 
This lets contributors with such ideas do their code in pcb-rnd without 
risking stability and without having to wait for 
yet-another-big-refactoring. Core plugins don't bitrot as easily as 
external plugins, so we could upgrade core APIs ever since, without having 
to worry too much. In fact we could do the whole data model 
redesign/rewrite, spanning about 1.5 years, while other parts of the code 
could also develop.

About find.c: incidentally, at pcb-rnd we are getting to a point where we 
are really preparing for a full rewrite of find.c, for other reasons, 
mainly because the new data model will allow us to provide a much simpler 
implementation. It may happen this year, or if not, then probably next 
year.

About Levente, who started the original thread: after an annual flame war 
on file formats he started a pcb-rewrite effort, based on sqlite. But 
that didn't get far and later on he abandoned geda and switched to kicad. 
That project was: https://github.com/leventelist/apollon

(Since that my efforts in pcb-rnd proved my point that our proplems came 
from the data model, not from the file formats or how exactly we store our 
data in memory).

Regards,

Igor2