[Magic-dev] Magic Questions

[Viet Dinh]

Hi everyone,

We've been working off the magic 7.4.27 version for a while now.
We're running both under linux fedora core 6 and Solaris 2.8

This version appears quite stable - we've been able to do a lot of work
with it, but we have noticed a number of small issues with it and are
wondering if any of them can get fixed.

1. Some of our users prefer to use this version w/o the Tcl/tk interface 
- basically the old style. In that mode two problems seem to be pretty
problematic:
    - When DRC is enabled, it takes over and basically runs in the
foreground; as a result no interactive command can be entered until it
is finished. While not a problem on small cells ( drc completes quickly
), interactive DRC has to be turned off on larger blocks/chips. I
remember from a few years back a similar problem with version 7.2 that
had been fixed. Is there anyway this could be fixed ?

    - Also, under Solaris, a suspend command (ctrl-Z) in the window will
usually cause magic to crash when the process is woken up. Something
about interrupt handling I think, but I am not sufficiently
knowledgeable about this.

2. We make use of the cif DRC options available and have a special
"cifoutput drc style" section in our techfile to handle it. In a
previous email, I was reporting that if that "drc style" section is not
the first one in the cifoutput style section, the techfile will not load
properly. Someone reported the same problem but I don't think it has
been fixed.


3. Read only mode of magic files
    One of the nice new feature is that when magic files are read-only,
you cannot edit them.
    However, a "flatten" command won't work on a read-only design even
though this command creates a new cell and does not modify the design.
Is that an intended behavior ?

Thanks again for all the hard work! These newer versions are really
keeping magic alive and kicking!
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