Re: [Gnucap-devel] netlist translation via XML/XSLT

[al davis]

Dan McMahill wrote:
> Has anyone looked at gnetman? I think that was part of 
> the idea there. The author of that tool has quite a bit of
> experience in netlist databases so it may be a useful 
> starting place. Even if none of the code is used, there 
> may be some good ideas there.    
 
It also may be useful as an example of what not to do.

For starters, it is over 50000 lines of code.  That is 
comparable in size to all of gnucap.  

I couldn't figure out how to use it.  Something about TCL 
scripts, etc. 

When I tried to build it (on my laptop, which doesn't have much 
installed), it took a few tries to get it to work.  First, the 
configure script crashed.  (See why I like autoconf so much???)  
Among the gibberish preceding the crash, I recognized the 
string "TCL", so I figured the crash might have something to do 
with the language called TCL, which wasn't installed, so I 
installed TCL.  That got through the configuration, but it 
still failed to compile.  The first message was that it 
couldn't find a certain header X11/something.  Strange ..  What 
is it using X for?  I did not have the X development package 
installed, only the user stuff, so I installed the X 
development packages.  Then I could compile it.  As usual, 
autoconf didn't help.  I thought the need for the X development 
tools to be strange for something that shouldn't be X 
dependent.  I also wondered why it was allowed to go all the 
way to the compile phase before finding it, or why if TCL needs 
it, TCL didn't bring it in (Debian package problem?).

I still think AWK will do the job.  AWK is good for small 
programs, perhaps a hundred lines or so at the biggest.  That 
is the size I expect a Spice to Verilog-A translator to be.