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From: Kai-Martin Knaak <kmk AT familieknaak DOT de>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] making DRC less misleading in the presence of shorts, non-routed rats, etc.
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2015 05:50:01 +0200
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Britton Kerin wrote:

[automatic "optimize rats" after DRC]
>     > The problem is it's destructive: it resets the rats > so if
>     > the user is trying to work on a subset of the board while
>     > sometimes doing DRC refresh it's going to be annoying.

Thinking about this again, I'd say, this is a scenario which won't 
happen too often. Typically, either the layout is already completely 
routed but needs some modifications. Then there are not so many rats 
to begin with. Or you are doing a portion of the layout for the first 
time. Then the tracks should automatically conform to the currently 
set design rules. So there is no much incentive to fire the design 
rule checker in the first place.

That said, why not put a check button in the DRC window to 
activate/deactivate automatic "update rats"?


> The problems with this are:
> 
> * unless you do a lot of work to do the above stuff, the results of
> the checks still won't make it into the DRC window, you'll just get
> messages
> and maybe a little bit of orange on the main display.

This is (much) better than the current nothing. After all, connection 
check never gives you more than messages in the log and a little bit 
of orange in the main window.


> * it's not obvious how to do it for non-gtk.

Uh, the same as for GTK: Put a check button in the DRC results dialog 
to activate automatic connection check.


> An pop-up dialog to
> choose this each time would be really annoying

Why a pop-up?

> * it's still a lot more trouble than the one-liner even ignoring
> these issues

IMHO, the resulting UI improvement is worth the effort. I have seen 
more than one shorted board because the user failed to do a final 
connection check before exporting gerbers.

---<)kaimartin(>---