kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Vesa Solonen <vesa.solonen@xxxxxxxx>]

On 29/04/15 15:37, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> On 4/27/2015 6:56 PM, Adam Wolf wrote:

>> 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

Essentially this means that the library system must make metadata of the
contents available for browsing/searching before actually loading the
whole implementation data.

Like an index of the book ;)

Some way of extracting the library information for machine use in an
intermediate (binary) repesentation and caching that may speed up as
well. Parsing loads of ASCII for every startup is not sustainable for
complex designs. The intermediate format could be just a runtime memory
image with some checksumming or encryption to avoid nasties.

-Vesa