kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 4/27/2015 6:56 PM, Adam Wolf wrote:
> 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?

This is a catch-22.  If you add all of the component libraries to
kicad.pro, the new users will know which libraries exist but power users
will bite your head off because they only want the libraries they need
to prevent the library load and search overhead to a minimum.  If you
use a minimal number of libraries, power users will be happy and new
users will complain that there are no component libraries.  I'm not sure
there is a good solution to this problem.  The current kicad.pro file
aims for the middle where the most common libraries are included for
convenience but not all of them for speed.  This way nobody gets what
they want.  If nobody is happy then it's probably a pretty good
compromise :)  I've always though a document on how to configure kicad
would be worthwhile. All of this information is in the current
documentation but it's scattered all over the place and it's not always
clear why you would want to customize your configuration.  Given that so
few people read the documentation, I'm reluctant to create such a document.

> 
> What's the desired behavior for a new user?
> 
> (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
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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 <http://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
>     <http://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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