Christmas

Having been horribly ill for what feels like most of December, Christmas is now here! I'm spending Christmas with my parents and all of my siblings, and it seems like I've been running around like a mad things for the last few days getting everything clean, tidy and ready for Christmas. On Christmas Eve my mother and I were at the butchers' shop at half past six in the morning to get the turkey and other bits we needed! This was most certainly a better option than waiting in the hour-long queue that had formed by the time I returned to the town centre later in the morning to do some other shopping.

Although being miserably ill put a big damper on my plans to do vast amounts of gEDA development during December, I've nevertheless managed to get some useful stuff done, further based on the libgeda error reporting issues discussed in my last couple of posts.

Firstly, I improved the way in which errors in Scheme files were reported. Messages reporting errors in gEDA rc files often reported the error as occurring in the wrong file, and claimed every error was a parenthesis mismatch (often when they were nothing of the sort). The error messages were also sent directly to the console rather than to the gEDA logging mechanism. Using deep dark Guile debugging magic, any errors encountered while reading in rc files now logs a backtrace, and tries to report the actual file and line on which the error occurred.

Secondly, and more importantly, I added internationalisation support to libgeda using gettext. As there are many international users of gEDA, and many important messages generated by libgeda, I feel that this is a very important development.

I'm hoping that we can use the web translation tools offered by Launchpad to make translating gEDA easier for users, and thus increase the quality and number of translations.

Peter Clifton and I have also been working hard on getting gEDA ready for a new release, squishing as many serious bugs as possible. Peter Clifton has particularly excelled himself, creating stunning icons for all the main file types used by gEDA.

In the next development cycle, I hope to substantially increase the flexibility of the component library. In particular, I hope to make it possible to have truly independent library setups, so that it is possible to have schematics from different projects with different libraries open in the same gschem session without any conflicts. I also hope to generalise the library infrastructure so that the same basic code can be used for the component library, hierarchy source library and any other library of reusable resources which might need to be added in the future.

As a first step along the route to the Ultimate Resource Library, however, the way that the Scheme extension API works needs to be rationalised, and once Christmas starts to wind down, I hope to deal with this. It will involve fluids.

Update: My blood test results have arrived, and it turns out that I have glandular fever. Absolutely fantastic.