Re: [ng-spice] Proposal for ngspice development in winter


To <ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From "john wood" <john.wood@multigig.com>
Date Fri, 2 Nov 2001 08:21:54 -0800
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
References <Pine.LNX.3.96.1011101112617.30503D-100000@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it >
Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

Dear ng-spice,

We managed to carefully hack Xspice integrated in ng-spice but
with very partial success.

I worked for many days of hand-hacking, making sure the
control flow of ng-spice and xspice meshed up properly,
but the spice
segfaults whenever a x-spice like
statement appears in the netlist.   Some problems with
the two parsers.

The xspice source was bundled inside a give-away version
of spice which compiled and ran on windows.
http://www.anasoft.co.uk/superspice.html
(not there any longer but I have the tarball).
There were quite a few bits that had been
tweaked to get XSPICE to work with Spice
as I could tell by the comments.

Ng-spice looks quite different in it's handling of brackets
etc.   Because of the unknown number of patches
on the spice above,  I dont really know where to
start on the debugging process.

We also have XSPICE on magnetic tape (which noone can read).

Anyway,  today I take on a new employee who's job
it will be to get XSPICE working properly with ng-spice.

We plan to support a version of Spice. It is an essential
part of our evaluation software.   All S/W we are
releasing with GPL because we make money licensing
patents.

Any help from the ng-spice gratefully received.

John




----- Original Message -----
From: <p.nenzi@ieee.org>
To: <ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>; <ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 2:41 AM
Subject: [ng-spice] 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
>
>


Partial thread listing: