[Fedora-electronic-lab-list] Re: [Alliance-users] Question about gcp

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Mukund Sivaraman <muks at banu.com> wrote:
>> I see your project is targeting GTK libraries to replace Motif, don't
>> you think Qt is now a better choice with the future Qt LGPL release ?
>
> Most of the code is in C, and are console tools and libraries. We think
> that these can be helped by using glib in them. glib's utilities,
> logging facility, language bindings, etc. can all be easily added in
> the existing code.
>
> Two of us are GNOME developers and hence are very familiar with the
> GTK+ stack. So naturally we want to use GTK+ for the GUI tools. Both
> GTK+ and Qt satisfy the requirements very well. The licensing is not a
> factor in our choice as we are changing Herb's license to only be
> GPLv3.

Hello Mukund and Christophe,

Being a KDE4 user and most of my friends are gnomers, I would
recommend Tcl/Tk for the following reasons:
- new users from the digital asic designers are already familiar with
Tcl - coming from proprietary software
- more chances to get contributors in, as writing plugins becomes easier
- the users of herb/alliance are not software developers, thereby if
it is a Qt/GTK based app, it will be a bit hard to build a community
around herb as users are not software developers
- (this is very important to the opensource EDA community) : more
compatibilities with other Tcl/Tk based apps such as magic,
irsim,netgen, xcircuit,...

The latter is important because currently herb/alliance is more
digital oriented and having already a handful of tcl/tk based analog
tools from opencircuitdesign and Graham Petley's standard cells, I
believeTCL/Tk is the right choice to follow as in the future, there
will be more chances to have more mixed signal simulation with
opensource EDA tools. The developer of Ngspice is planning to write a
TCL/TK based frontend for ngspice and if herb uses Tcl/Tk, we will be
able to ensure several design flows with opensource EDA tools. Knowing
as well the fact that Tkgate provides verilog support with a simple
tcl/tk based app, it would be nice to have easy and quick scripting
interface to both design and simulation.

I'll respect your choice of gtk, however I believe this decision should :
- be based on what the advantages are for the designer.
- not be about ones' favourite API

It is important to have a community around herb if we all want herb
development to continue for at least 5 years.

Kind regards,
Chitlesh