kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Richard A Burton" <richardaburton@...>]

Just a few thoughts of mine...
(note i use the term symbol for everything below regardless of what it
really is, you can figure out what i mean...)

> a) Location of the library
> ---------------------------
> * In linux, all the libraries is located in /usr/share, and the user is unable
> to modify the schematic and the footprint. (It needs to copied somewhere
> in the home directory).

I don't think these should be installed world writeable or anything
like that as a solution. I think it's reasonable to have people copy
and modify ones if they like, but the way to do that is probably to
allow overrides, i.e. look in users home directory and use symbols
from there instead of the stock ones if they have the same name.

> c) updates of the library
> -------------------------
> * Really hard to notice, if the default libraries (which comes with kicad) has any new device inside.

Probably each symbol needs a version number (incremented for any
non-trivial change), which is stored in the kicad file when it's used.
That way if you load a kicad file that used old version of symbols
(e.g. after an update to kicad that used included new symbols) you can
be warned of the change.

> d) using multiple locations(directories)
> ----------------------------------------
> * To avoid unnecessary copies of the whole default library. It is necessary to specify multiple library location.

Seems reasonable, e.g. home dir suggestion above.

> d) lack of versioning
> ------------------
> * The title says it all. There are some case where would be nice to notify, if a device was modified

Right, you must have been talking about something different in C above.

> One schematic/footprint/package one file:
>
> There is no need to collect multiple schematic inside one file. There are
> dedicated tools for that (an archiver: .zip, .tar.gz), if the size matters.

Yes, please put them in a zip file, or some other such archive. There
is something horribly inefficient about lots small files when one
large one will do. I agree with your logic though, having separate
files for each symbol. Using an archive seems logical to get the
advantages of both, just takes a little more effort to implement.

> And while we are it, it would be nice also to use standard URI-s instead of
> C:\\Document and settings\\Username\\Desktop\\kicad\\library and
> /home/username/Desktop/kicad/library

Nice yeah, but I wouldn't think that important unless you set up your
systems identically so you can move between them with the same path
settings.

Richard.