Release notes for the gEDA/gaf 1.5.1.20081221 development/unstable snapshot

This is the next development/unstable snapshot of the 1.5.x series. Major highlights of this snapshot include (in mostly random order):

libgeda/gschem:
• Changed how objects are selected:
• For lines, unfilled boxes, unfilled circles, arcs, pins, nets, and buses you need to click on the object itself to select it.
• For filled boxes, circles, text, and components, you will be able to click on the bound box.
• Changed the rendering internals to use regions (and invalid regions) when drawing/redrawing
• Vastly improved the selection and changing of colors in various dialogs
• Started cleaning up the handling of colors
• Reviewed, cleaned up and integrated the net selection patch
• Added support for arbitrary filled and unfilled paths (file format change and rendering, and postscript output)
• Added rendering code to draw hatched fills in paths
• Added functionality to hatch arbitrary polygons
• Added the ability to change the arc radius on the arc angle dialog box
• Now you can edit arcs using the arc angle dialog box (select arc and execute edit->edit)
• Usability and feature improvements to the component selector dialog box
• Made some zoom and pan operations adjustable
• Fixed a bunch of misc user interface quirks and bugs
• Vastly improved the component selection dialog box to show a list of attributes
• Added the ability to execute guile commands (":" key)
• Migrate a bunch of custom linked lists to use GList instead
• Modified always-promote-attributes rc keyword to accept list and string
• Fixed a few bugs in postscript output
• Improvements, additions, and bug fixes to the scheme functionality
• Improvements to various error handling and reporting
• Enabled the promotion of attributes when adding a component from guile
• Added the ability to have (and convert) svg images in the doxygen code markup
gnetlist:
• Improved the connection traversal algorithm which should yield a significant improvement in generating netlists
• Added a new gnetlist backend for liquidpcb
• Various improvements to the bom2 gnetlist backend
• Fixed some potential buffer overruns
• Many improvements to the regression test
• Fixed up the systemc backend
gattrib:
• Usability improvements and fixed a few crashing bugs
• Removed all non-functional menu items and sheets
utilities:
• Updated gsch2pcb's PCB board output to be the current file format
• Added a new utility called gxyrs: a pick and place tool
• Added --gnetlist-arg option to gsch2pcb to pass extra arguments
symbols:
• Tweaks to some of symbols to use fill paths
• Updated some symbols to use a current file format
examples:
• Updated some of the gschem example schematics to be current
• Created a new gschem test schematic which shows all font characters
general/all:
Huge amounts of code cleanup, consolidation, removal, commenting, reorganization, and portability fixes
• Lots of improvements in to the API (especially in libgeda and gschem)
• Fixed a bunch of nasty memory leaks in various places
• Bumped the gEDA/gaf file format version number to 2
• Bug fixes for the cygwin and mingw port
• Fixed the a large number of bugs (including bugs from the SF tracker)
• Bumped the minimum gtk+/glib version requirements to 2.8.x or later
• Updated the translations (Spanish and German)
• Lots of improvements to the inline doxygen comments
• Fixed a bunch of compiler warnings

NOTE: This is an unstable snapshot and should NOT be packaged up by distribution package maintainers.

Changes

You can see all the changes in this release only between v1.5.0 and v1.5.1 here. This page contains the all the commit summaries and respective authors.

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

• Many thanks to everybody who contributed to this development snapshots (number of commits in parentheses):
• Peter Clifton (248)
• Peter TB Brett (53)
• Patrick Bernaud (43)
• Werner Hoch (41)
• Ales Hvezda (21)
• Bernd Jendrissek (20)
• Dan McMahill (9)
• Carlos Nieves Onega (9)
• Edward Hennessy (6)
• Cesar Strauss (4)
• Kipton Moravec (1)
• Gabriel Paubert (1)
• PNG export was broken under 1.5.1. There is a patch available here which fixes this breakage. To apply do the following:
• cd into geda-gschem-1.5.1
• Run: patch -p2 < PATH_TO_PATCH/PNG-export-fix.patch
• Rebuild and install gschem
• The gnetlist regression test suite will fail with certain newer version of GLib due to a change in the hash table code. The developers will investigate this in the next version of gEDA/gaf.
• French keyboard users may have trouble pressing the ':' key (to enter guile scripts interactively). Please remap this key to some other pressable key if this is a problem for you.
• The next development snapshot (in the 1.5.x series) will be released as soon as the tasks listed here (todos) are completed.
• The next major stable snapshot (1.6.x) will hopefully happen early next year.
• Please submit all bugs to the bug tracker.

Download

• http://www.geda.seul.org/devel/v1.5/1.5.1 (USA)
• md5sums for this release can be found here.

Required Libraries/Programs

Required libraries:
• gtk+ ≥ 2.8.x (tested with 2.14.x).
• guile ≥ 1.6.x (tested with 1.6.x and 1.8.1).
  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

Packages/Binaries/Installers

No packages or installers are available for this release. Please build it from source.

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