Proposal for ngspice development in winter
Hi all,
As Alan suggested, we need some guidelines to continue our mission.
Since we are all working in our spare time the goal cannot be too
much ambitious.
There was a discussion, before the summer on the ACS simulator which ended
without a clear choice (if my memory has not been wiped by the summer). It
seems that both project are continuing each one on its way; Al working on
ACS and us on ngspice/other.
Al has asked us to work with him, donating the code "to the cause" and
evev changing ACS name to reflect the change in the development team.
The main problem for switching to ACS was the C++ language.
On the other side, spice3f5 can be described like a good working bug, is
not very well written and difficult to extend/improve without breaking the
code, ad rework-13 has shown. But spice3f5 is an established standard with
a lot of legacy code and patches and with many people who worked whit it
and are happy to contribute their patches.
A third option is to build another circuit simulator from scratch, but
this seems a silly option now.
Many people, during the past have expressed their opinion on how to extedn
ngspice, mainly on the frontend/parser side, which is the worst part of
the simulator.
This is history, now what I think we can do in the next months:
1) Complete the sourceforge import (CVS, mlists, web, ftp)
2) Establish a sourceforge backup (at home, office, ISP)
On the ngspice side:
1) Close the bug in the code that were reoported during summer and release
a rework-14 stable before december.
2) Work on a pre15 including new patches after release.
What do you think ?
Ciao,
Paolo
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