kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> YES!  It would be cool to have basically *all* the settings in there.  I see
>>> value to even recording the current sheet in view, maybe even the mouse
>>> pointer setting, colors, what not, so that a user can pass a schematic file
>>> to a support person and actually convey what he/she is seeing and how it looks.
>> This makes version control for projects almost impossible. I agree
>> that you want those settings available, but in a separate file would
>> be much better for schematics under version control.
>>
>> I'm not a fan of a million different files either, but a schematic
>> user options file would mean everyone working on a centralised project
>> can have their own local preferences without affecting the schematic
>> in the repository.
>>
>> This way it works for version control, and in a support role someone
>> could forward you both the schematic and schematic user option files.
>>
>> Does this sound like a reasonable case?
> I believe some of the settings are currently saved in the project file.  Would
> that be a better place to store them or would they create the same version
> control problem as saving them in the schematic file?  Maybe a separate last
> state file for this kind of information may be the way to go.  That way you
> just ignore the file when using version control.  I probably would make it
> project wide so we don't need to keep a last state file for every Kicad
> application.
>
> Wayne

Another idea to put on the table is to have a filter tool, which takes the
schematic, and writes a file suitable for version control to the same name
but with a different extension.

It is still s-expression, still parse-able and loadable normally, but has
optional information stripped that would give VCS grief.

Along side our other work, we should be developing s-expression tools which
work generically anyway, I mean without regard to grammar.

So to make this plan work, you'd simply have to strip out one wrapping
s-expression element from a schematic and save it to disk again, but say
with a different file extension.

This is a proposal that I am not in love with, but it does address both
objectives, VCS support and self containment.