kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 28/04/2015 00:56, Adam Wolf a écrit :
> Oof.  Guess that's what happens when you spend March in Canada.
> 
> How are users supposed to know what footprints are available in each
> library?  Are we expecting users to open libraries in a text editor? Should
> they add each one, one by one, and then see if they have footprints they
> need for the design, and then remove them if they don't need them?
> 
> What's the desired behavior for a new user?

Are you talking about schematic libraries or footprint libraries ?
Why to load them one by one? you can load many libraries at once.

The desired behavior for any user (not only new user) is:
- To know where libraries are stored.
- To have a look to this list.
- To select libraries which *can be* useful. (if you want a FTDI symbol,
and when you see ftdi.lib in this list, is it really mandatory to also
load the Xilinx or the valves or the relay library?)
(And also build personal libs, from available and public libs)

Guys working on the new kicad libraries have made a very good job.
Libraries (both schematic and footprint libraries) are now reorganized
to help the choice.
(the price to pay is some incompatibilities with old libraries).

When you have 10 or 20 libs, you can load all of them.

When you have hundred of libs, you cannot because:
- The time to load, or display the list of components or footprints
becomes very long (especially footprint libs, when they are loaded from
Github)
- Some libraries are "duplicated" (cmos4000 and cmosieee use different
shapes (ANSI or IEEE) for the same component) (in schematic, the lib
source cannot be selected, you have to load only the right lib)
- Some are very specific (transfo, elec-unifil, dsp) or contain old
components (hc11.lib, valves.lib) for old designs and are useless for
most of users, especially new users.

Here are reasons why I am thinking loading *all available* libs is a bad
practice.
You have to make a choice between them.

> 
> (I had two users contact me last week saying my OS X nightlies were missing
> some FTDI symbols that were on Github, so I started investigating...)
> 
> Adam Wolf
> On Apr 27, 2015 5:51 PM, "Nick Østergaard" <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> Someone tried this before:
>> https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg17320.html
>>
>> 2015-04-27 16:13 GMT+02:00 Adam Wolf <adamwolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> I noticed there were a bunch of libraries done by the library folks that
>>> aren't in the default kicad.pro, so I was missing out on a lot of their
>> good
>>> work!
>>>
>>> Over the weekend, I added all the libraries to the default profile.  If
>> this
>>> is something we want in the main tree, awesome.
>>>
>>> Note, there is an "updated" timestamp in kicad.pro, and I did not
>> adjust it.
>>> It does not appear to have been adjusted the last time it was updated
>>> either, so I left it alone.
>>>
>>> Adam Wolf
>>> Cofounder and Engineer
>>> W&L
>>>
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>>
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS