Release notes for the gEDA/gaf 20050313 snapshot

Changes

general

Lots and lots and lots of code cleanup, refactoring, and bug fixing by Patrick Bernaud, Stuart Brorson, Carlos Nieves Onega, Werner Hoch, and Dan McMahill. This applies to all parts of gEDA/gaf. The amount of cleanup is quite staggering, so please look at the various ChangeLogs for more info. Many thanks to all who lent a hand in this rather difficult task!

libgeda

Shared library version number now at 23.
Carlos added proper unicode support to libgeda. Schematic and symbol files can now have unicode characters in them and as long as there is a font definition file for them, the characters will appear in gschem. This was the last piece for making the transition over to gtk+ 2.2.x. Patrick did some misc cleanup on the unicode support as well.
Patrick rewrote the logging mechanism to use GLib's message logging.
Carlos added picture support to libgeda. This allows users to put pictures in various formats into schematics. Pictures are not yet rendered in postscript or png files. This feature will be completed in a subsequent release.
Dan added electric fence support to all configure scripts.
Dan squashed a whole bunch of gcc warnings as well turning on -Wall by default to further point out developer laziness. :)
Patrick rewrote the all guile code to use the 1.6.x scm interfaces. Dan and Carlos did some minor touch up to catch other missed deprecated guile interfaces.
Patrick rewrote the component library code to be sane.
Stuart added code to read in rc files when a schematic file is loaded from a foreign directory. This allows users to open up schematics that have local symbols.
Stuart add code for of a component placeholder for when a component cannot find its symbol file. This was extended a little to draw a graphic informing the user which component is missing its symbol file.
Fixed the symversion= code handling to deal with the case when no other attributes are attached to the component. In the past, this scenario was simply ignored.
Added code (temporarily till the bug is fixed) which forces libgeda to output the vector font when rendering multi-line text items. This behavior can be controlled via the gschem rc keyword: output-vector-threshold

gschem

Werner Hoch completely rewrote the Attributes/Autonumber Text... dialog box. This new dialog boxes fixes some of the past problems and hopefully will satisfy more users given that it has far more capability than the last dialog box.
Patrick completely rewrote the multi attribute dialog box. This is a significant change which really improves the usability of this dialog box. Other than just being a major visible improvement, there are other features: you right click on the attributes themselves to Delete or Duplicate them and you can enter multi-line attributes by hitting Control-Enter instead of enter.
Bert Timmerman contributed an updated Dutch translation.
Iznogood contributed the first versions of the French translation.
Carlos added the first versions of the Spanish translation.
Carlos went through all the code and gave them all stock pretty stock icons.
Patrick completely rewrote the page manager to be sane.
Stuart improved the right mouse button pop up menu to include a few more commonly used options.
Handsom Greg supplied a patch to allow gEDA/gaf to build using gtk+ 2.6.x.
Patrick removed any limitations on number of files in the component library code.
Part of Stuart's work on reading in rc files in different directories, system-commonrc was renamed to system-gafrc.
Patrick rewrote most of the code for the line type and fill type dialog boxes. They can now be used for multiple objects.

gnetlist

Carlos modified the bom, bom2, drc2, and redac backends to write to stdout if a "-" is specified using the -o flag.
Dan added several guile functions to deal with target netlist refdes requirements which may be more restrictive than gschem/gnetlist. Dan also updated his futurenet2, pads, and switcap backends to use these new functions.
Carlos improved his drc2 backend to check for duplicated references as well as properly return exit codes to allow gnetlist to be used in Makefiles easily.
Carlos added several functions for use in the DRC backend.

gattrib

Stuart made a bunch of bug fixes and improvements including:
Added a pop-up window if a component is found with no symbol file.
Fixed a bug where only one page of design was searched for missing attribs.
Fixed bug where pre-existing attribs were deleted instead of being replaced.
Added support for slotted components.

gsymcheck

Carlos added a check of the pintype attribute value.
No other significant changes except a bunch of code cleanup and updating.

symbols

Carlos and Patrick made the necessary changes support unicode characters in gEDA/gaf. Wojciech Kazubski also contributed Polish font definitions.
Stuart added a bunch of SPICE symbols.
Werner Hoch did a considerable amount of fixing of various broken symbols. Many thanks.

geda (gManager)

Applied segfault patch by Werner Hoch.
Added updated Italian translation by Marco Colombo.
No other significant changes except a bunch of code cleanup and updating.

utils

Stuart added additional printfs to gsch2pcb during directory search when using the -v -v flags.
No other significant changes except a bunch of code cleanup and updating.

docs

The gsch2pcb tutorial was updated to the latest version.
Carlos updated the file format document to describe the new picture object.

examples

Stuart updated some of the schematics in the RF_Amp example.

For more a detailed changes, please look in the appropriate ChangeLogs in the source tarballs.

Notes/Bugs/Errata/Known Issues/Last Minute Issues

I'm pretty sure that because of a bug in libgeda's ./configure script, libgdgeda is no longer optional, but if you supply the --disable-libgdgeda flag to libgeda's ./configure you should be able to workaround this problem.
The docs and gnetlist packages were regenerated due to small buglets on March 15 and 18th respectively.
gtk+ 1.2.x is no longer supported. You must use gtk+ 2.2.x or later.
guile 1.4.x is also no longer supported. You must use guile 1.6.3 or later.
Due to various last minute issues, I did not get to checkin all the user contributed symbols that were uploaded since the last release. I will take care of that for the next release.
This was a pretty significant release with lots of people contributing various pieces. Many thanks to all who did contribute either new code, symbols, bug fixes, code cleanup, and/or testing! All of this work is _greatly_ appreciated.
As usual, send all bug reports and suggestions to the geda-dev or geda-user mailing lists. Thanks.

Download

http://www.geda.seul.org/download.html (USA)
http://ftp.sunet.se/geda/download.html (Europe)

Source Tarballs

md5sum	Name	Size
11254491704f66bd62d92c964f1854f6	Makefile	30 KB
be8848ae8573edb761dcfe929981e899	geda-20050313.tar.gz	384 KB
f8684122c4727fc0bd7e0cd89437d68e	geda-docs-20050313.tar.gz	2.7 MB
fe82a604ad4d4f281797fd457eaae358	geda-examples-20050313.tar.gz	239 KB
db62db5b77df408dd180b6f6cc65864e	geda-gattrib-20050313.tar.gz	307 KB
0d7f0c0feecdbbc1eb8d4ba174551051	geda-gnetlist-20050313.tar.gz	310 KB
3c7caa75677dfdb03c7428076f1d1226	geda-gschem-20050313.tar.gz	1.5 MB
12d94d1a75867fbde883027099e1d6a2	geda-gsymcheck-20050313.tar.gz	129 KB
a08895cb4a70c07b11b816b0843d3a0b	geda-symbols-20050313.tar.gz	644 KB
fbdc7676027a6547f54308b88851395d	geda-utils-20050313.tar.gz	242 KB
aff7e68dd56f10624ed3891a4d83dbfe	libgeda-20050313.tar.gz	999 KB
Total Size:		~7700 KB

Required Libraries/Programs

http://www.geda.seul.org/dist

Required libraries:

gtk+ ≥ 2.2.x (tested with 2.4.x). Note, gtk+ 1.2.x is no longer supported.
guile ≥ 1.6.3 (tested with 1.6.7). Note, guile 1.4.x is no longer supported.

Required programs:

pkg-config ≥ 0.15.0
NOTE: You MUST install pkg-config regardless of gtk+ version.

Optional libraries:

LibStroke ≥ 0.5.1
libgdgeda ≥ 2.0.15
NOTE: You MUST install 2.0.15, 2.0.9 and earlier versions will not work.
zlib ≥ 1.1.x
libpng ≥ 1.2.x

Binaries

None at this time.

Building, Installing, Running

There are several ways of building gEDA/gaf:

Download *all* the above files and the required libraries.
Build and install the required and optional libraries.
Untar all of the geda tar files in the same directory.
Set the prefix= variable in the Makefile
Run: make and set the specified variables (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH)
Run: make install
This should complete with NO errors.
Run: gschem and select Help/Manual... for all available documentation.
Before you run gschem, gnetlist, gattrib, or gsymcheck you will need to set those three environment variables, or add them to a shell startup file (.bashrc, or .bash_profile or .profile)

-OR-

Download all the above files and the required libraries.
Set the specified variables (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH) correctly to the place where you are installing everything.
Build and install the required and optional libraries.
Untar all of the geda tar files in the same directory.
Go into each directory and run:
./configure [ with --prefix=$HOME/geda if you wish ]
make install
You must build and install the packages in the following order:
1. libgeda
2. symbols
3. gschem
4. gnetlist
5. gsymcheck
6. gattrib
7. geda
8. utils
9. docs
10. examples