kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[dick@xxxxxxxxxxx]

> I think it's a good idea.  This will be better than nothing once the
> search path stuff gets removed (at least for Pcbnew and CvPcb, yeah!!!).
> It still could lead to incorrect footprint selection in the case where
> there are footprints with the same name in multiple libraries.  I don't
> think this is much a problem with the standard KiCad libraries but we
> could run into issues with third party libraries.  In the short term,
> it's probably not going to cause many problems.  However, given that we
> now support so many different library types, the risk for footprint name
> clashes increases.  Maybe we should check for duplicate footprint names
> and warn the operator in the case where the select footprint name exists
> in more than one library and no nickname is defined.  This way the user
> will have a chance to select the correct library nickname without having
> to go back and define the library nickname in Eeschema.  I'll try to
> find the time to take a look at it this weekend.
>

>
> And maybe grab the nickname for the report. Â There may be some use cases where it
> cannot work without fancier FPID compares. Â I only ran the case where I brought in a
> new footprint one time. Â If it becomes a mess we can drop it.
>


In hind sight it seems silly to search the actual libraries if the footprint
enumerations are collected in the FOOTPRINT_INFO_LIST (sp?) class.  So what I did is no
good.

If the nickname is obtainable by this easier means, we can go back and remove the else
{} in recently extended footprintLoad(), just to guard against cruft accumulation.  I am
not in love with this feature, so if takes you more than 45 minutes to make sense of it,
then it is not worth it to me.  Others, I don't know.

The real solution will be getting into a footprint browser from within eeschema.  This
guy in the link really had it right.  Multiple *years* before reading this thread, I had
come to the same conclusion as the complainer:

   http://www.eevblog.com/forum/open-source-kicad-geda/seriously-irritated-with-the-library-editor!/

I intend to spend some time on this.