kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I checked the size of our largest footprint library and when zipped it scrunches to
70kbytes.

This was not pretty, but legacy.  But I don't anticipate a noteworthy difference in size.

Therefore the concept of getting 70kbytes in one https://github.com hit seems reasonable
even with country folks like me with slow internet access.  My internet speed is only
160bytes / second.  So the download time of this 70kbytes file, after it is zipped and the
https session is established, will be less than a second.  Maybe 1-3 seconds total with
SSL session establishment overhead, depending on github load and internet whims.


I am encouraged, and I think I will end up using this plugin as my main means of getting
footprints, period.


If no one volunteers, I have it on my to do list to convert what we have to pretty, then
push it to github.  I would use lib_convert.py to do this, for each library.

If someone else wants to do it, that would be helpful.  I certainly understand the "show
me" mentality.  If you've yet to see the GITHUB_PLUGIN work, then why would you invest
time in this?  I understand that.  But I've also seen it work, so I am confident that
somebody will probably step up in the near future.

Just yesterday I made a tweak to the pretty output which tries to put pads on one line if
they are not tricked out with optional attributes.  That would be the format to use, from
a build at least that new I suppose.

Also, note that a library repo can be pushed with a README.md file, and in that file you
could elaborate on and include an index of all footprints in the library in freeform text.
 This way a person could web-browse there and read about footprint choices first, in
potentially great detail.

Note that although subdirectories can be used in the repo, this view is flattened as the
plugin unzips the footprints into its cache.  So if you use subdirectories, make sure you
have unique footprint names.  With the upcoming options support, it will be possible to
build in directory filters or other tricks into the plugin.  But that will be for some
other developer to do.  I will provide the options support to all plugins.

Beyond that, there is also the ability to comment each footprint in the *.kicad_mod file,
manually using a text editor for now.  The *first* lines of

# ... anything

are ignored by pcbnew.  This may not be as helpful as the table of contents in the
README.md file.

You can sort of tell that this infrastructure is screaming for leadership.  I don't see
where that leadership needs to come from a programmer/developer.  It is simple
administration and guideline establishment.

But yes, it is still a little early, we've got to get it running on all the platforms
first.  Our thanks go to Brian, Miguel and anyone else helping with that.


Dick