Release notes for the gEDA/gaf 20070216 snapshot

libgeda/gschem
• libgeda's shared library version is now 28:0:0.
• Fixed code in various places to make sure gEDA/gaf works with guile 1.8.x as well as 1.6.x. (various people)
• Merged autonumber branch to trunk. The autonumber branch included many improvements to the refdes auto numbering functionality in gschem. (Werner Hoch)
• Many many improvements to the existing gschem dialog boxes, mainly to bring them in compliance with existing gtk+ conventions like using GtkDialog box instead of the homegrown broken dialog box among other things. (Werner Hoch)
• Improvements to the auto place function to make it smarter when dealing with objects with pins on 3 or 4 sides. (Carlos Nieves Onega)
• Added standard Control-x, Control-c, and Control-v hotkeys for cut buffer, copy buffer, and paste buffer. Now gschem will behave a little bit more like what users expect. Also, properly enabled/disabled menu options depending on if the user has something in the buffer or not. (Ales Hvezda)
• Update configure and autogen mechanisms to always use the installed version of gettext when building the CVS version. (Ales Hvezda)
• The filename of the current schematic is now in the title bar instead of the status bar. Put the grid settings into the status bar. (Werner Hoch)
• Moved embed and unembed functionality into libgeda so that other programs (like gschlas) can embed/unembed components. (Ales Hvezda)
• Merge of the glist_dev (code changes to use GLists in more places) branch to the trunk. Many thanks to Carlos and PeterB for undertaking and completing this huge cleanup effort.
• Postscript output improvements: making sure line width are not printed too thin (with the ability to control this thickness via an rc keyword), fix for offset printing margins, and the ability to configure postscript font size. (Mike Jarabek)
• Various language translations updated.
• Many more bug fixes, compiler warnings fixed, code cleanups. (various people including Peter Brett, Werner Hoch, Peter Clifton, Carlos Nieves Onega, Stuart Brorson, Dan McMahill and many more)

gnetlist

• Integrated patch by Jeff Mallatt to enable SPICE netlisting of slotted parts. (Stuart Brorson)
• Added -g help to list all the available backends; patch by Tomaz Solc. (Ales Hvezda)
• Integrated the various gnetlist regression tests into make check. (Carlos Nieves Onega) (Unfortunately, this had to be disabled temporarily since make distcheck does a VPATH build and the tests need to be fixed first before make check will pass; work to fix this is underway already).
• Bunch of improvements for the various gsch2pcb backends. (Dan McMahill)
• Fixed up various backends to work with guile 1.8.x. (various people)
• Added SPICE-NPN and SPICE-PNP to dispatch to cover cases where people had munged the transistor symbols to the spice-sdb backend. (Stuart Brorson)

gattrib

• Applied patch by DJ to enhance the sort of columns (Ales Hvezda)
• The usual bug fixes and code cleanup. (various)

docs

• Updated the wiki snapshot to the latest web wiki version.

symbols

• Added Hungarian characters and greek mu character contributed by Sztrikó János. (Carlos Nieves Onega)

gsymcheck

• No significant changes.

utils

• Added new command line and project file option to gsch2pcb: "skip-m4". Now you can tell gsch2pcb to not use m4. (Dan McMahill)
• A bunch of hardcoded paths were removed from gsch2pcb. Now a single default directory which is based on ${datadir} is used. If the user wants to, they can override that with --with-pcb-datadir=/opt/pcb-20070204/share for example. (Dan McMahill)
• In gsch2pcb, when searching for newlib footprints with, for example, a name like footprint=MY1206, match either "MY1206" or "MY1206.fp" so we can start having extensions on footprint files without needing to explicitly add the ".fp" part in the footprint= attribute. All of the footprints in the pcb distribution which came from the m4 libraries have .fp extensions now.) (Dan McMahill)
• Add some example schematic files in the gsch2pcb example directory. (Dan McMahill)
• Added command line switches to gschlas to embed/unembed all components in the specified schematics. (Ales Hvezda)
• Added new script by Paul Tan: Script for non-flatten hierarchical Verilog netlist. (Ales Hvezda)

examples

• No significant changes

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

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

• Many thanks to everybody involved in this release. Thank you!
• As usual, send all bug reports and suggestions to the geda-dev or geda-user mailing lists. Thanks.

Download

• http://www.geda.seul.org/devel/20070216 (USA)
• http://ftp.sunet.se/geda/devel/20070216 (Europe)

Required Libraries/Programs

Most can be found at: http://www.geda.seul.org/dist

Required libraries:

• gtk+ ≥ 2.4.x (tested with 2.6.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
• libgd ≥ 2.0.33
  libgdgeda 2.0.15 is no longer used or needed. It has been relaced by libgd 2.0.x. gEDA/gaf will no longer compile using libgdgeda.
• zlib ≥ 1.1.x
• libpng ≥ 1.2.x

Packages/Binaries/Installers

• Debian packages for unstable can be found here or using apt-get.
• RPM packages for Fedora Core 4 can be found here.
• An updated gEDA Suite CD is currently being tested and will be uploaded soon.

Building/Installing/Running

There are several ways of building gEDA/gaf:

1. Download *all* the above files and the required libraries.
2. Build and install the required and optional libraries.
3. Untar all of the geda tar files in the same directory.
4. Set the prefix= variable in the Makefile
5. Run: make and set the specified variables (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH)
6. Run: make install
   This should complete with NO errors.
7. 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-

1. Download all the above files and the required libraries.
2. Set the specified variables (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH) correctly to the place where you are installing everything.
3. Build and install the required and optional libraries.
4. Untar all of the geda tar files in the same directory.
5. 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. utils
   8. docs
   9. examples