kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> I don't think that the functionality of what cvpcb does now will/should go away
>> entirely. Having a tabular view of the whole BOM essentially and quickly be able to
>> review and change the one or other footprint is great and needed, in particular in
>> the final passes of a project. Though it should not be an external program as it is
>> now, essentially communicating back and forth with files, which makes the process
>> tedious and error prone.

> I should have been more clear.  The functionality will not go away.  The
> stand alone application will go away.  The CvPcb functionality will be
> pushed into one of (pcbnew most likely) the shared objects and will be
> usable from either the schematic editor or the board editor.  I have
> always found running CvPcb as separate application to associate
> footprints to be cumbersome.  I would rather assign them when I'm
> editing the schematic because I almost always know the footprint of the
> component when I'm designing the circuit.


>> Never said to junk the tabular view. Something like the list views in orcad capture
>> would actually very useful.


Launching CVPCB now is like giving birth under water.  By the time the child gets its
lungs full of air, it feels like a brain damaged product.  And the github plugin is taking
the blame.  Surely everyone understands that if you increase the number of libraries
sufficiently, you can always eventually come up disappointed in the time it takes to LOAD
ALL OF THEM BEFORE YOU TAKE YOUR FIRST BREATH OF AIR.

In the kiway branch the initial change is to have pcbnew, footprint viewer, footprint
editor, and cvpcb all share the same footprint memory cache.   Those benefits won't be
visible until milestone B) however.  (Milestone A) is still a bunch of individual programs.)

  https://blueprints.launchpad.net/kicad/+spec/modular-kicad

https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror/wiki/Modular-KiCad-with-Alternate-Top-Level-Launchers


In concert with, or after milestone B), alternatives fully different than CVPCB become
possible.  So about the time that the performance is likely to be fixed, the very utility
of the program is reduced.


BTW, I did look into caching in the github plugin.  But what I found was that it took just
as long to query the age of the repo, as it did to download it again.  So caching in
github plugin is not a big win.


The biggest win is to minimize the number of times you ask the plugin to download 78
libraries before you can start your work.  That would entail software design at a higher
level.



Dick