kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo_bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----

> From: Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Kicad Developers <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2014 3:32 AM
> Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] CERN work package 4 (Extend number of layers)
> 
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 06:07:18PM +0200, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote:
>>  How about modifying the PCB parser to produce warnings for designs that
>>  contain layers unsupported by this particular version (same for new object
>>  types, such as arcs on copper layers, diff pairs, polygons in footprints,
>>  etc.)?
> 
> Also if you don't include the new layers they wouldn't appear anyway in
> the file, so compatibility is kept.
> 
> Junking entities on load when on unsupported layers *could* be done, but
> is that desiderable? what's the 'official' opinion about the 
> 'just do
> make and upgrade' argument popped up a while ago (for similar reasons)?
> 


Junking entities on load is never desirable because it makes garbage of someone's
files. If you ignore anything when reading a file, you must make absolutely
sure you never write over that file. For primarily text documents like PDF you
can still read most of the PDF, but for technical data like KiCad it is not a
good idea to display only part of the information - it needs to be all or nothing.
 I prefer for the parser to fail and for a message to pop up to give the user a
little information on where/why things failed (file format version number +
whatever token was not recognized).

- Cirilo