Licence to use for releasing ULPs,  user   interface guidlines

Olin wrote on Mon, 29 March 2010 09:38

Sounds like a rather trivial piece of software to bother with all that.

If you're looking to get famous, a arrow head ULP probably isn't the

right vehicle.  I think you'll also find the world largely doesn't give a

crap about yet another diddly little ULP that does some cutesy thing.

Oh.. my insignificant baby-code ULP that puts pink flying unicorn

arrowheads in the fab drawing is now sobbing unconsolably in the corner of

the playground, and will need counseling for self worth issues when it

grows up.

Quote:

At best a handful of people will use it, maybe.  I've got more

complicated ULPs than that, and so far it hadn't occurred to me to even

put my name on them, let alone try to restrict their use somehow.  I have

no idea if anyone is using them, but probably none to few.

If a single other person is using your stuff, the efficiency gain and

general usefulness may be double what it is for just you using it. 

First of all, I'm not trying to restrict use. A legal disclaimer of

warranty and liability is important to me.  If it winds up going somewhere

(which yes, is unlikely,) I'd like my name to stay somewhere in the

comments. 

As for this arrowhead thing, I think someone on here was just looking for a

dimension arrow generator of some sort, and it's something that would've

saved substantial time over the past 10 years of my career.   So I decided

to give it a shot.  Adds arrowhead to existing wire in board, for

dimensioning fab drawings, which has occasionally slaughtered me on time in

Eagle. My general procedure for this has been to copy the outline line,

move it outside the outline, change the layer, then hand draw (or

cut/paste) an arrowhead on it.

Maybe someone's done a dimensioning arrow ULP already, done it better, and

I just didn't search right.

As for fame, I will freely admit to wanting to increase the mass of general

public searchable body of my work, as long as it's examples that don't

embarassingly suck, and especially I would like to get involved in some

sort of publicly available collaborative software work.

Quote:

By the way, I do arrows by having devices for that in my symbols

library.

That's a good idea, and I can't believe I didn't think of it, but I

didn't.

Quote:

I think the most important thing is to have good comments at the top of

the file.  Note that these can be HTML-like.  If written right, the

heading shows up in the control panel left pane by the ULP name, and the

complete header comment is expanded and displayed on the right pane when

that ULP is selected.

Thanks.  I'll look in your stuff for examples of the HTML.

Cheers,

Alex

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Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

faveluka wrote on Mon, 29 March 2010 02:58

I've written a add-arrowhead-to-line ULP that might be useful to

others, and I'm wondering the best way to release it.

Just put it out there.  CadSoft has a place for that on their web site.

Quote:

Basically, I'm looking for "no warranties, public domain, but please

leave original author name in comments" statement.

Sounds like a rather trivial piece of software to bother with all that.  If

you're looking to get famous, a arrow head ULP probably isn't the right

vehicle.  I think you'll also find the world largely doesn't give a crap

about yet another diddly little ULP that does some cutesy thing.  At best a

handful of people will use it, maybe.  I've got more complicated ULPs than

that, and so far it hadn't occurred to me to even put my name on them, let

alone try to restrict their use somehow.  I have no idea if anyone is using

them, but probably none to few.

By the way, I do arrows by having devices for that in my symbols library.

I don't know how a automated ULP could know which direction I want to show

the arrow in, so adding arrows to the schematic works well for me.  All my

Eagle stuff, including the symbols library, is in the Eagle Tools Release

available totally for free at http://www.embedinc.com/pic/dload.htm.

Quote:

Also, are there any user interface guidelines on how a ULP should

behave to the outside world.. for example, program naming conventions,

logfile and config file naming conventions?

I think the most important thing is to have good comments at the top of the

file.  Note that these can be HTML-like.  If written right, the heading

shows up in the control panel left pane by the ULP name, and the complete

header comment is expanded and displayed on the right pane when that ULP is

selected.

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

http://www.cadsoft.de/cgi-bin/download.pl?page=/home/cadsoft/html_public/download.htm.en&dir=eagle/userfiles/ulp

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