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ISE 7.1 small advice about project files (.ISE extension)

Hi

just a little thing: starting from 7.1 ISE abondoned the use of plain text project files, the new project files with .ISE extension are PKZIP compressed - that can cause an additional problem if ISE is not closed correctly as the ZIP archive could corrupted rendering it totally useless, ISE will refuse to open and use it. And there is no recovery, the project must be done from scratch - well its only the project file and can mostly easily be recreated, still if your computer (or ISE on it) can occasionally be doing crash, then I would say its a good idea to make manual backups of the ISE project files. Just in case.

For me it was real surprise, I was working on project, configured the FPGA 'live' on the PCI board in the same computer, re-enabled the BARs run a test on that thing, it did froze the PC, well seing that the ISE project was corrupted after that was a bit scary. Well that the price you pay if you dont use plain text files, I really dont see any advantage that ISE now uses compressed project files that can not be manually edited, in previous releases I often did edit the .NPL files in text editor, thats not possible any more

Antti BTW the word "ise" means in estonian language me(myself) so therotecial conversation Q: What was the reason for the crash? A: ISE (as Xilinx ISE)

the answer (in estonian) would/could be understood that its YOUR fault. But its not our (the customers) fault if tools fail.

Reply to
Antti Lukats
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Sounds more like they goofed on when to open/close, more than the Zip. If it is zipped, and properly closed when not changed, you should be able to unzip outside ISE, and even edit - and if it was well behaved like any text editor, it would say "Project file has changed outside ISE

- reload?" I'd raise it as a web case, and tell them to fix the open/close handling. [ but their list is getting quite long ....]

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

I have to agree on that point. It's very annoying that the project file is not in plain text anymore. I'm used to change project setting (a.g. add VHDL files) in an editor. Usually tools add files with absolute paths (that's the case in Quartus, I don't know in ISE). Than you can't transfer your project to a different directory/machine/user. When adding the files manually in the project file you can use relativ paths and you're fine.

Martin

Reply to
Martin Schoeberl

I've heard too many horror stories about 7.1 to upgrade yet, and probably won't until I start to use Virtex 4. In 6.1 at least the project navigator uses relative paths to source files and also allows you to convert from absolute to relative paths.

Reply to
Gabor

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