Release notes for the gEDA/gaf 1.5.4-20090830 development/unstable snapshot

This is the next development/unstable snapshot of the 1.5.x series. NOTE: gEDA/gaf v1.5.3 was withdrawn due to some release critical bugs. gEDA/gaf v1.5.3 was not widely distributed before the release critical bugs were discovered.

Major highlights of this snapshot include (in mostly random order):

General:
• The entire build system has been rewritten, greatly simplified, and unified
• gEDA/gaf is now distributed as a single tarball
• GTK+ 2.10.x or later and guile 1.8.x or later are now required
• intltool is no longer required

libgeda/gschem:
• Text rendering is now using native system fonts
• Image rendering is now using cairo instead of GDK
• The attribute edit dialog box in gschem now has completion of most common attribute names
• The multi-attribute edit dialog box in gschem now show unprompted symbol attributes
• Most menu items in gschem now have icons and properly aligned key bindings.
• Menu accelerator keys are supported as well
• Assigned shortcuts "vd" and "vl" for changing to the dark or light color schemes in gschem
• Changed the focus to the "save" button in the close confirmation dialog box in gschem (and gattrib)
• Cleaned up the slot dialog box in gschem
• Changed the grip size rendering in gschem to be reasonably sized when zooming a lot
• Introduced a a new attribute searching API
• The Spanish translation has been updated
• Lots of code, infrastructure, and doxygen documentation cleanup and refactoring

gnetlist:
• gschem2pcb and PCBboard gnetlist backends have been removed; all users should continue using gsch2pcb.
• gnetlist does not recommend the drc2 backend every time it runs; the drc2 backend is only useful in certain circumstances
• Fixed a problem with

gsymcheck:
• Consistent style doxygen documentation is now generated
• Fixed the test suite for out-of-source directory builds
• Fixed a whole bunch of minor bugs in the test suite

gattrib:
• Many doxygen comment improvements made to gattrib
• The unimplemented "File -> Open" menu option has been removed
• Added --disable-gattrib command line flag to ./configure to disable the building of gattrib when using gtk+ 2.17.x

utilities:
• gsch2pcb checks for and rejects non-footprint PCB files
• tragesym now accepts empty attributes in the src file

symbols:
• All of the old vector font definitions have been removed
• Recursive make is used significantly less when inside the symbols directory

documentation:
• Documentation is now installed into ${docdir}
• The installed wiki snapshot has not been synced up with the gEDA wiki

examples:
• No significant changes

Bugs fixed:
• 1758673: Combine source tarballs
• 2058707: Dangerous button focus in "Save changes" dialog at quit
• 2430369: deselecting component doesn't deselect hidden attrib
• 2449060: Graphic state left inconsistent cancelling from net mode
• 2460301: Embeded symbol contents different depending on how embedded
• 2455061: Gnetlist output changed, and tests fail with recent GLib
• 2655088: autogen.sh doesn't stop on all errors
• 2823703: Quote problematic pin names in pcbpins
• 2823755: gnetlist: Compile error with DEBUG=1
• 2836109: Need to check that groff can create HTML files



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 v1.5.3 and this release (v1.5.4).

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

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

• If you launch some of the gEDA/gaf programs (such as gschem or gnetlist) and your gEDA/gaf install is somehow broken, you will not see any error messages (just a program that terminates immediately and silently). You can look into ~/.gEDA/logs for a log file that will describe the problem. This lack of error message will be fixed in the next release.


• Many thanks to everybody who contributed to this development snapshots (number of commits in parentheses):
• Peter Clifton (87)
• Peter TB Brett (77)
• Jared Casper (1)
• Gareth Edwards (1)
• Uwe Hermann (1)
• Ales Hvezda (32)
• Werner Hoch (2)
• Kai-Martin Knaak (1)
• Krzysztof Kociuszkiewicz (1)
• Dan McMahill (18)
• Carlos Nieves Onega (4)
• Mark Rages (1)
• Bert Timmerman (8)


• Please submit all bugs to the gEDA/gaf bug tracker.

Download

• Primary download site: http://www.geda.seul.org/devel/v1.5/1.5.4 (USA)
• md5sums for this release can be found here.

Dependencies

Required programs:
• A C compiler and C standard library (GCC and GNU Libc are recommended)
• A lex tool for generating lexical scanners. (Flex is recommended)
• A awk tool for data processing. (GNU awk is recommended)
• pkg-config ≥ 0.15.0
  

Required libraries:
• gtk+ ≥ 2.10.x (tested with 2.16.x).
• guile ≥ 1.8.x (guile 1.4.x and 1.6.x are no longer supported)
• GNU gettext ≥ 0.16
• GNU troff
• The freedesktop.org MIME info database
• The freedesktop.org utilities for manipulating .desktop files

Optional programs/libraries:
• The doxygen API documentation tool (recommended for developers)
• LibStroke ≥ 0.5.1

Packages/Binaries/Installers

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

Building/Installing/Running

Building gEDA/gaf has been greatly simplified starting at version 1.5.4 (20090830). Instead of having to deal with multiple tarballs, you now just need to download and build a single tarball which contains all of gEDA/gaf. Here are the steps required to building gEDA/gaf:

1. Download and install all the required dependencies. You will probably want to use your distributions package management system (such as apt-get or yum) to install the dependencies.


2. Download the gEDA-gaf-1.5.4 tarball.


3. Untar the gEDA/gaf tarball by running (using GNU tar):
   

         tar xvfz gEDA-gaf-1.5.4.tar.gz
       

   Change directory into the newly created directory (gEDA-gaf-1.5.4)


4. Build the software by executing the following commands inside of the gEDA-gaf-1.5.4 directory:

         ./configure --prefix=$HOME/geda
         make 
         make install
       

   If the above commands execute without any error messages, then you have successfully built and installed gEDA/gaf. If you encounter any errors, be sure to read the README and INSTALL files contained within the tarball.


5. You can now run the various programs in the gEDA suite. Please read the README file which describes what is available.
   gschem is the schematic capture program and can be run by executing:
   

         PATH_WHERE_gEDA_GAF_IS_INSTALLED/bin/gschem
       

   It is recommended that you add PATH_WHERE_gEDA_GAF_IS_INSTALLED/bin to your PATH environment variable (typically done by modifying one of the following files: $HOME/.bashrc, $HOME/.bash_profile, or $HOME/.profile).

   It is highly recommended that you read the gEDA documentation at this point. You can access the gEDA documentation by running gschem and select Help/gEDA Documentation... from the top menu.