Hacking in the unstable branch

For most of June, gEDA has been in the process of switching from using CVS to git for version control, and quite a lot of developers' time seems to have been spent on getting used to the new system. I really like the new system; it makes reviewing changes and maintaining patchsets so much less of a chore, and my productivity has gone through the roof!

I've made really good progress on the component library and Scheme work which I said that I had planned to do during June:

1. The component selector preview widget now works properly for all possible component library backends. My changes coincidentally fix a security hole exploitable by malicious library distributors (they could use the library directory RC file mechanism to execute arbitrary code on your system).
2. system-gafrc is now installed by libgeda, and loads separate Scheme files for the default libraries and default font. Hopefully, this should make it easier to avoid using the default symbol library at all if, for some reason, you don't want it.
3. I zapped a bunch of deprecated Guile functions, and changed the configure scripts to check for Guile by version, but it's pretty boring stuff and I don't really have any motivation to finish it of at the moment.
4. Replacing the directory and command component library backends with equivalent Scheme implementations has had to be suspended, due to the fact that the Guile functions for working with pipes really don't work very well on Windows, and Windows support looks like it's going to become more important over the next few months.
5. I've replaced the s_clib_glob() with a similar function, s_clib_search(), which can operate either in exact matching mode or glob matching mode. This will allow people to use symbols with glob special characters without strange breakage. I've also added a caching mechanism for the results of the search. I went through all the places where pointers to CLibSource or CLibSymbol structures might be cached, and tried to make sure that they weren't; this was to make it possible to add, remove and refresh component sources without causing breakage.

I have introduced a patch to my personal tree which adds a list of currently used symbols to the component selector. I find this really useful already for speeding up adding frequently-used parts to my schematics, such as resistors and capacitors. I'm also hoping to add a button to the component selector dialog which allows you to directly open a selected symbol for editing.

My recent work (and discussions on the mailing lists) have inspired two more ideas, about which I'll go into more detail on a future occasion:

• Per-directory configuration contexts.
• Overhaul of the embedding system to make it more useful.