kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Werner Almesberger <werner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> The concept of a *library file* is gone. [...]  Each
> component that we traditionally think of residing in a *library file* is
> actually in its own file on disk in a directory (or repo or schematic). 

That alone is a great idea :-) For projects with shared access, that's
more or less mandatory if you want to have any kind of oversight of
what happens between revisions.

> This example would be a new SOMENAME component, and its graphics are
> fully inherited from SOMEOTHERNAME, and can be extended here, but not
> overloaded in any way that I can think up.

Stepwise refinement ist also a concept I like. Do you envision that
a GUI user would still find it convenient to make full use of the
potential of this system ? Or would they have to switch to a text
editor for some things ?

> Enter the version control system.  Since each component and component
> source code fragment exists in its own file, a source code control
> system is used to house these files, and they can be accessed by using a
> SCCS repo, file name and version number, over the Internet, or locally.

How would the "pinning" of a component you reference occur ? E.g.,
would it be  (interit FOO)  (with the pinning completely external) or
more like  (inherit FOO-rev12345)  or perhaps  (inherit FOO (origin
dicks-bazaar.org/parts/comm/gsm/amp/ 12345))  ?

> One possibility for this is to build a tcp socket oriented bridge into
> Bazaar's access API, which I assume lets you access any version of any
> archived file.

Hmm, why the TCP bridge ?

In general, I'm all in favour of making KiCad aware of revision
control systems. In qi-hardware, we're working on implementing
graphical revision histories and a large part of the work is to
just deal with all the small mistakes people make when committing
things. If KiCad could take care of, say, marking files for
committing, that would eliminate the need for quite a few dirty
hacks. Similarly, we haven't run into problems due to the current
lack of pinning yet, but I'm sure we will.

So, I very much like the direction in which you're thinking of
taking this.

- Werner