kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

User options, preferences, state, and settings:

These all mean different things to different people, until you have a set of
definitions.  So I will try briefly to distinguish and define.



1*) User options

These are the same things  as "user preferences", and come in at least two
flavors:

a) what to use on a new project, when it is first created.  These could and
should be configurable such that any new project gets these settings as
initial values.  Obviously these start from a global place, and get copied
into a project specific place.

b) schematic specific options are also configurable, affect only current
schematic, and reside in a schematic specific place.



2*) State variables

These are things which change as a result of using the schematic editor,
such as mouse pointer position and sheet on screen, currently selected mouse
tool, and zoom level.




3*) Settings

I guess this means user options, but since it is ambiguous, and not clearly
conveying a new concept, we probably should not use this term.



My proposal to put the stuff into the schematic, pertains to 1*b) and 2*). 
Inherent in my proposal is the desire to address the needs of those using a
version control system, which includes me also.

The general concept is that a schematic can be loaded even when some
information is missing, and therefore it is OK to remove some information
when saving for a VCS commit.  If you look at the above definitions, it is
clearly a case that we would not want 2*) State variables in the VCS
compatible schematic file.   1*b) is not so obvious, and it can be argued
that these preferences do in fact belong in the file, in particular if they
change the type of board that you might end up with.


Dick