kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 06/04/2014 03:48 PM, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote:
> On 04.06.2014 21:35, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>> On 6/4/2014 2:33 PM, Lorenzo Marcantonio wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 02:20:12PM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>>>> user confusion.  Where would you save them in the old kicad_pcb file
>>>> format after you made changes?  If Pcbnew where a read only application,
>>>> then this would be less of an issue.
>>>
>>> That's why I questioned if it would be desiderable...
>>>
>>> The only thing I think would be possible to keep *backward*
>>> compatibility is using optional forms, so if you don't use that feature
>>> the file remain compatible (no strange layers and the file still loads).
>>> I changed the quotation rules for the sexp in a backward compatible way
>>> and now they are both LISP and kicad compatible.
>>
>> Backwards compatibility is not optional.  We should always be able read
>> older board and footprint file formats.  That was one of the things that
>> drove the design of the current layer parsing of legacy boards and the
>> design of the new layer sexpr format.
> Hi Wayne.
> 
> I understood Jean-Pierre's statement as "old version must be able to 
> read files written by a newer version".





Old version software must only support old version files, anything else is fools gold.

New software must support old files and new.