[Xcircuit-dev] converting generic lib to pcb aware

[Eric Y. Chang]

Hi.  I am almost done with setting up the XCircuit to pcb flow.  The flow
on standard parts works (but there still are some bugs, for example, rat
lines in pcb will not refresh unless the program is restarted).  Custom
parts are now working, using some suggestions from the netlisting
tutorials, but it is still a bit inconvenient managing the libraries.
The remaining problem lies in generic parts that one is attempting to
elevate to annotated status by adding info pins.  It does not work.
Adding a single info pin as recommended in Task 14 of the tutorial
does not work, and adding multiple info pins as found by editing parts
in analoglib2.lps does not work.

The problem is that the "?" is propagated into the pcb netlist, where
pcb is unable to resolve it.  This occurs, for example, when one takes
the crystal symbol ( -|[]|- , sort of), places an instance of it, and
either edits the instance, or runs "m" on the instance to generate an
object in the user library.  If diagnostic printout is performed in
writepcb() (in netlist.c), within parseinfo(), the place where the
info pin is read may be checked.  If the crystal is call X or xt, the
token with a ? appears in the Page*.pcb file, without the ? being
replaced by an incremented device index.  This replacement works for
R and C.  It was found that entries in the postscript XCircuit file
(schematic) contained the spurious "?" only for the new object, not
for R and C, so the question mark was supposed to have been trimmed
out before this time.  That means that writepcb(), which is excuted
much later does not have the bug.  The bug is upstream.  The code is
difficult to navigate.  Any ideas where the bug could be?

Note that since the custom flow works, it should be possible to build
the crystal object from scratch as was done above with ASCII art.  Then,
the suggestions from task 14 may be applied to add info pins so that
pcb can use the netlisted output.  This does work, but it is preferable
to be able to transfer the symbols without having to redraw all of them.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Eric

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