[Ngspice-devel] Error checking in NGSPICE

[Evan L. <e....@em...>]

Greetings all.

Just as a means of introduction. I work for a company that uses ngspice 
as an external circuit simulator, and there are a few features that we 
feel would greatly improve the usefulness of the code -- hopefully not 
only from our point of view.

One of the issues that we have been experiencing is the fact that spice 
exits with a return code of zero in most cases, even if an error is 
encountered. Also, simply searching the output for the string "error" is 
not really feasible in this case, since the clasification of errors and 
warnings or notes is not consistent. In our case, where we use ngspice 
in batch mode, this causes a number of problems for us.

I then propose that the error subsystem is reworked so that the 
application terminates -- especially when being run in batch mode -- on 
encountering an error. This can be done in conjunction with a 
reclassification of the errors, where it is decided which sould rather 
be warnings. Some errors may also have different classification based on 
whether batched or interactive mode is being used.

I would love to hear the thoughts of the rest of the developers.

Regards
Evan