Release notes for the gEDA/gaf 1.5.2-20090328 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:
• gschem now uses cairo (instead of gdk) for all rendering. This allows gschem to render all drawing primitive anti-aliased and hopefully the days of rendering artifacts and droppings is gone.
• Due to the above changes, cairo is now a required dependency. This isn't anything new as gtk+ has depended on cairo for a while now.
• Work on getting the cairo rendering to look good (careful hinting added to certain primitives)
• Gschem's grid is now drawn as a mesh grid (with major/minor lines) instead of dots. The grid modes (mesh/dots/off) can be cycled through via the "Options/Cycle grid styles" menu option in gschem.
• Net junction cues in gschem are drawn smaller now
• Lots of work on how colors are handled by libgeda and gschem. All colors are now specified using RGB/RGBA hexadecimal notation as well as a new Scheme colormap syntax
• Removed legacy Scheme colormap functions
• Bus pins are now drawn thicker than regular net pins. The pin type can be modified by selecting a pin, right clicking, and selecting "Edit pin type..." off of the context menu. Buses and bus pins are still not really supported by the netlister at this point in time.
• Added actions to the view menu to change the color scheme (light vs dark) at runtime
• Fixes to the line type and fill type dialog boxes
• The text origin marker (x) is now only drawn when text is selected
• Fixed the internal math for (warp-cursor "disabled") to be correct. This allows this option to be finally used by end users and they will get zoom behavior that behaves sanely.
• Cleanups to the snapping mechanism
• Added clipboard support to gschem
• Improvements to the fairly recently added path primitive
• All programs that link against libgeda now write their log files into ~/.gEDA/logs instead of the current directory
• Files that are selected using File/Recent files now open in the current gschem window
• Optimizations in libgeda to the text bound calculations
• Added some missing undo points in gschem
• Implemented a some PostScript output optimizations
• Added font renderer specific text bounds functions to libgeda
• Fixed the broken PNG export that occurred due to the changes to the drawing model
• libgeda can now be built as a DLL on w32
gnetlist:
• Improvements to some of the regression tests
• Modified gnetlist internals to avoid depending on GHashTable ordering for netlist output consistency
• The start of bus traversal added to gnetlist. This code is not finished and currently disabled.
gsymcheck:
• Added checks for overbars and escaping
• Added additional warning messages in certain circumstances
utilities:
• Bug fixes to the gxyrs perl package
• Feature additions and bug fixes to tragesym
• Fixed segmentation fault when gschlas loads files
symbols:
• The following symbol libraries had their overbars reworked: maxim, 4000, 74, linear, connector, misc, allegro, io, memory, national, and micro
• Fixed a bunch of bugs in various symbols
examples:
• Minor improvements to some of the examples
General/all:
• A few translations updated
• A plethora of internal changes to data structures, API, and code organization.
• A bunch of code refactoring between libgeda and the dependent programs
• Misc fixes to the auto* mechanism (configure scripts/Makefiles)
• Improved w32 support in the various programs
• Added all of the dox (doxygen) files to the release tarballs
• The usual slew of bug fixes

Many more changes were made in this release. The above is only a summary of the most user-visible changes. You can view all the commits/changes/authors for this release here.

NOTE: This is an unstable snapshot and should NOT be packaged up by distribution package maintainers. This request for non-inclusion might change in the future, stay tuned...

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 (128)
• Peter TB Brett (41)
• Stuart Brorson (2)
• Ales Hvezda (12)
• Werner Hoch (18)
• Carlos Nieves Onega (1)
• Maciej Pijanka (1)
• Bert Timmerman (20)
• Please submit all bugs to the bug tracker.

Download

• http://www.geda.seul.org/devel/v1.5/1.5.2 (USA)
• md5sums for this release can be found here.

Required Libraries/Programs

Required libraries:
• gtk+ ≥ 2.8.x (tested with 2.14.x).
• guile ≥ 1.8.x
  NOTE: guile 1.4.x and 1.6.x are 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