Release notes for the gEDA/gaf 1.6.0-20091004 stable release

This is the first stable release of the 1.6.x series. This stable release is a roll-up release for the past 10 months of gEDA/gaf development.

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

General:
• Fixed and updates to the MinGW port

libgeda/gschem:
• A net is drawn and rubberbandded when connecting and moving apart pins
• The slot handling code was cleaned up

gnetlist:
• none

gsymcheck:

gattrib:
• Fixed the GtkItemEntry code inside of gattrib code so that it builds using gtk+ > 2.16.x.

utilities:

symbols:

documentation:
• Updated the shipped documentation from the online wiki

examples:
• none

Bugs fixed:
• 2832985: gattrib does not build with gtk+ 2.17



The above is only a summary of the changes in this release. You can view all the commits/changes/authors for this release (v1.6.0).

For a complete list of all the changes in this roll-up release, please read the release notes for the 1.5.x series:

• gEDA/gaf 1.5.0 Release Notes
• gEDA/gaf 1.5.1 Release Notes
• gEDA/gaf 1.5.2 Release Notes
• gEDA/gaf 1.5.3 not distributed
• gEDA/gaf 1.5.4 Release Notes

NOTE: This is an stable release and should 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):
• Ales Hvezda (8)
• Cesar Strauss (2)
• Peter Clifton (11)


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

Download

• Primary download site: http://www.geda.seul.org/release/v1.6/1.6.0 (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 since the last stable release (v1.4.3). 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-1.6.0 tarball.


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

         tar xvfz geda-gaf-1.6.0.tar.gz
       

   Change directory into the newly created directory (geda-gaf-1.6.0)


4. Build the software by executing the following commands inside of the geda-gaf-1.6.0 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.