[FEL]: PCB snapshot 20091103 as updates

Release Notes for PCB snapshot 20091103
This release represents almost 200 commits and as such this summary clearly is not complete.  See the ChangeLog file for the complete list of changes. This release was pushed to Fedora repositories. Users are advised to update their pcb installation to benefit those bugfixes and stability.

 

• [feature] Add attributes to layers
• [bugfix]  Remove memory leak in attributes
• [bugfix]  Avoid layer buttons getting confused (GTK)

• [bugfix]  Fix dereference bug in hid_find_action()
• [feature] Speed up some polygon operations
• [bugfix]  Don’t let DRC change the grid setting
• [bugfix]  Correct URL’s in some dialogs and output
• [feature] Add filters to load file chooser dialog (GTK)
• [bugfix]  Avoid segfaults with png HID with newer versions of libgd
• [bugfix]  Don’t disperse locked elements
• [feature] Added experimental topological autorouter
• [feature] Added the beginning of a testsuite.
• [docs]    Document FreeRotateBuffer()
• [docs]    Add some additional notes on the usage of the existing autorouter
• [feature] Add –png-bloat option
• [bugfix]  Fix several bugs found with valgrind
• [bugfix]  Improve the pre-install wrapper script
• [bugfix]  Several fixes to the autorouter
• [feature] Allow quoted strings and escaped characters in action arguments
• [footprints] Add missing INDC3216M, remove duplicated RESC3216M
• [feature] Added the ability to customize mouse events via gpcb-menu.res in the GTK HID.
• [feature] Added the ability to use mod1 (alt)(option) in HIDs.  Useful on OSX.
• [bugfix]  Fix compilation issues on centos
• [bugfix]  Make the detection of tools and build system around building the documentation be more robust.  Users should not be worrying about –disable-doc or –enable-maintainer-mode anymore
• [footprints] Add T018, T039, fix pinout of T092 to match JEDEC
• [bugfix]  Speed up rendering of DRC violation previews under GTK
• [bugfix]  Fix some crashing bugs related to polygons and thindraw mode
• [feature] Added a DRC refresh button
• [bugfix]  Fix some pango markup in the GTK DRC dialog
• [bugfix]  Fix cursor warping on flipped boards (GTK)
• [feature] Added preview images in the DRC violations window (GTK)
• [feature] Add a DrcViolationType structure and add hooks to allow HID’s to use this
• [bugfix]  Fix some polygon memory leaks
• [feature] Add an API for registering actions with a context to support scripting languages like GPMI.
• [bugfix]  Fix a bug with the Report(NetLength) action and NULL pin/pad names
• [bugfix]  Allow exporters to work with hairlines (width of 0)
• [tools]   Increase autoconf version to 2.60 since we were using some features of it
• [bugfix]  Fix a number of polygon related issues
• [bugfix]  Fix a number of gcc warnings
• [feature] Don’t display undocumented options in help output.  This helps the transition when deprecating an option.
• [feature] Add outline mode for photo-mode exporting
• [footprints] Put the mark on pin 1 for axial footprints to make them more likely to fall on grid
• [bugfix]  Fix flipping of arcs
• [bugfix]  Fix parsing of old-syntax arcs
• [bugfix]  Include explicit text/lines on silk layers in the assembly drawing output
• [feature] ‘–ben-mode’ has been renamed to ‘–photo-mode’
• [bugfix]  Fix some crashing bugs on boards with a large number of rats
• [bugfix]  Fix an off-by-one bug in the GTK netlist window
• [docs]    Add getting started guide
• [feature] Add support for parsing suffixes on numbers (“um”, “mm”,”in”, “mil”)
• [bugfix]  Fix some configure/build issues when cross compiling
• [bugfix]  Fix some improperly used automake conditionals
• [feature] Add additional crosshair shapes
• [fedora] Sub package -doc entails documentation in different file formats.

Filed under: FEL, pcb

SystemC License again ! Communicating with OSCI Board

This is no secret for everyone that for a while I wish to see SystemC in Fedora repositories. However, a small glitch within the license in terms of redistribution prevents us from shipping it.

Jeremy Bennett is very kind to introduce me to some members of the OSCI board. I have already contacted two weeks them ago. Till yesterday, I haven’t got any reply. So I’ve resent a reminded to those board members in hope to understand the reason behind this glitch.

In the meantime, David Cabanis, the SCLive maintainer as well is wishing to see this licensing issue resolved.

Filed under: fedora, systemc

choose EL or FEL — FEL package list

It was asked several times to publish a list of FEL packages. Maintenance of that list is a blocker. We don’t want to publish obsolete data since Fedora’s development cycle is 6 months. 6 months fly back very quickly. Hence an automated mechanism is advised to solve this issue.

We also receive some requests from users for additional data exposure :

• A friend of mine wants concrete data which he can analyse before choosing whether CentOS or Fedora is appropriate for his analog and characterisation team. The choice of Fedora or CentOS depends on the features and bug fixes on the EDA tools. A tradeoff which the user has to make.
• Some metrics to reflect the critical path in packaging for a particular design flow and which packages really need to be updated or rebuilt.
• Some metrics which are useful for the Spin maintainer to track the major changes done by multiple packagers. These metrics will eventually help to allocate required time for proper testing and integration before release.
• A list of FEL packages which Fedora Ambassadors can quick go through to help someone during an event.

Every two weeks, I ‘m auto-generating a basic html page listing all FEL packages and their versions with respect to Fedora and EPEL.

Filed under: FEL, fedora

Dead Upstream, what should we do ?

Shakthi has recently encountered a situation where I think the upstream of his package is pretty non-responsive, that we can call it dead upstream.

I went to see on sourceforge to see how many of the EDA tools’s development were pretty much dead. I was surprise to see many bright ideas unachieved.

So the question is

As a community driven and non-profit opensource EDA leader,  what should we do ?

I would like to hear from you how you would like to contribute to solve this situation.

As far as I’m concerned, I would rather want to take over the upstream responsibilities and little by little migrate the code/features to an active upstream of existing opensource EDA software. In other words, improve the existing supported opensource EDA tools.

It will also be very interesting for new developers who don’t actually know what to contribute to the opensource community.

Filed under: FEL, fedora

Civil Marriage, Today :)

My wife Mirjam and I, after our civil marriage today, Wed. 21 October 2009.

Filed under: Private

Mockups : headers, not this one, no, hmm yes

As you most certainly read somewhere, fedora spins will get a profile website each soon. I didn’t like the initial choice of colours for the headers :

Hence I spent the day(yesterday) tweaking CSS files and porting the text from the current FEL website to the new one. Below are some trials I had:

The header was to big to my taste:

Something cleaner:

After a lot of tradeoffs with Mairin for consistency with other spins, she spinned this mockup which suits us both.

She also designed the mockup for the other pages of FEL’s new profile website.

After it was a bit of confusion about those spin websites, initially I thought it would replace the current FEL website (something I was hoping for, so that more contributors can get edit access, other than me). However, these new websites will tend (for the moment) to reflect the profile of the spin without in depth details, which the FEL’s website currently has. That said, maybe for F-13, the infrastructure around those new profile websites will improve so that other FEL contributors can have edit access and can incorporate more details and technical publications about various EDA solutions Fedora provides.

Filed under: FEL, fedora

OpenMoko Hardware development on Fedora

Designing opensource hardware projects with opensource EDA software is a challenge for anyone, well not any-more with the upcoming Fedora 12.

While assessing the risk of the project, one first needs to ensure that he/she has a robust and complete tool set before starting up with the development.

In the past, the critical path of this risk assessment was setting up the development platform, compiling and installing the whole tool set (normally composed of least 8 software) from scratch. That said, the average user should allocate one or two days just for compiling all the dependencies, after he/she has roamed around the internet in search for some possible patches needed to ensure interoperability within his/her tool set.

As the community leader in opensource EDA provider, Fedora Electronic Lab strives to eliminate this painful process by preparing this development platform beforehand and gives Fedora users the opportunity to install the required tool set within 5 minutes. During the last two months, we have been focussing on ensuring that Fedora can satisfy the needs for the electronic hardware development of the OpenMoko community.

Fedora’s Kicad will follow OpenMoko’s development needs. That said, it will require Fedora’s Kicad be pulled from trunk. Jon Ciesla, Jacek Radzikowski and I revised the entire Fedora Kicad package and spec file. It was then updated to snapshot revision 1863. But, stability of kicad will be ensured. One of the goals of FEL is not to just talk how opensource software is good, but also to support opensource hardware development and helping users to develop products out of it.

We hope that the OpenMoko community can now work out of the box with

su -c “yum install kicad fped openocd”

svn co https://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/gta02-core/

cd gta02-core/

make update

make sch

instead of the time consuming process as described on this GETTING-STARTED document.

That said, we sincerely hope that our contribution might help OpenMoko developers seduce more contributors and reviewers easily.

Kicad’s module editor lacks automation and its output is difficult to review. Hence fped comes in as a footprint editor that captures more of the design process and allows one to annotate the footprint with measurements taken directly from the manufacturer’s datasheet.

Dean Glazeski, who was privately packaging OpenOCD, (an Open On-Chip Debugger (OpenOCD) provides debugging, in-system programming and boundary-scan testing for embedded devices.) joined Fedora Project and introduced OpenOCD to Fedora so that a wider userbase can benefit from it.

OpenOCD provides a human-readable telnet interface for manually halting/resuming the target device, reading/writing registers and memory, etc. In addition, it provides a RDI (remote debugger interface) on a TCP port. This interface can be used by gdb (the GNU Debugger).

We currently have the following list of packages under the Fedora Electronic Lab umbrella for the following architectures (i686,x86_64, PPC and PPC64). If you feel that we still lack tools that are important to OpenMoko’s development, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Filed under: FEL, eda, fedora , openmoko

Fedora Electronic Lab 12 Release Notes

The Fedora Electronic Lab team and upstream opensource EDA developers are proud (on schedule ) to publish the release notes of the upcoming Fedora Electronic Lab 12 ‘Constantine’ Livedvd.

It is 26-pages long and entails in-depth information about each EDA tool which have undergone updates or introduced for this release.

Filed under: FEL, eda, fedora

[FEL]: Fedora vacation and Tasks before F-12’s release

As from the 14th october, I’ll be in Fedora vacation till the 25th of october. I won’t be able to answer any of your emails during that timeframe. I apologize for any inconvenience that may cause.

However, we are ahead in schedule in terms of FEL development cycle compared to Fedora-12 general release.

Since every Fedora SIG has entered final freeze and F-12 branch has already been created, I would encourage you to try rawhide or the nightly spins. I would really appreciate if you could help with the testing.

TASKS TO COMPLETE BEFORE RELEASE

FEL Spin

• Verify that latest version (which has been built on koji) of electronics-menu, toped, fped, avra and picprog have been tagged for F-12 – TO BE DONE
• New spin website migration ( still pending on Fedora Infrastructure progress on this )
• Test nightly spins – TO BE DONE

Marketing materials

• FEL-12 Release announcement – TO BE DONE
• Everyone blogs about the features of FEL-12 – TO BE DONE
• FEL-12 flyer – done
• FEL-12 release notes – done

Opened tickets on Fedora hosted

Since these are tasks and requests for enhancements, we will have to deduce a date to migrate those tickets from FEL-12 milestone to FEL-13 milestone.

Filed under: FEL, eda, fedora

[draft]: Fedora Electronic Lab 12’s Flyer

During Fedora 12 ‘Constantine’ development cycle, we have improved the existing FEL platform with multiple updates and new features (just to name a few):

• Logic optimization with espresso.
• tclspice support for ngspice.
• 8051 and 8085 simulators.
• Collaborative development and code review methodologies.
• Stability on 64-bit architectures during long runtime (big digital projects).
• ……..

A Fedora Electronic Lab 12 flyer has been drafted to encourage users to test the upcoming test releases before the general public release.

In the upcoming days, I’ll post the Release Notes document of FEL-12. It already has 26 pages

Filed under: FEL, eda, feature, fedora