kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Giorgi <chrisgiorgi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Good evening,

I've been lurking on this thread for quite a while and feel this topic
is one I should chime in on.

The concept of keeping part names as filenames sounds promising on its
face, but I can envision several potential pitfalls. First, it
requires that the parts be stored in a filesystem to have proper
context, and contain one part per file. This limits the ability to
store parts in a database conveniently, makes it difficult to
implement parts archives as flat files for interchange of libraries,
and makes some names impossible to encode ( how do you handle a '*' in
a part number?, what about a '/'? Resort to escape codes?). In my
opinion, the filename should be allowed to be totally random (such as
automatically downloaded content often is) without loss of important
information. Filename collisions can be avoided entirely, and
conflicting parts can be identified even if you have "partnum.part"
and "partnum (1).part" from downloading two different libraries with
the same name.

   ~~~Chris Giorgi~~~