kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 01, 2015 at 08:30:25PM +0200, "André S." wrote:
> not sure if this is the right place to address this, but I think it is a bad
> move to change library parts in a way that breaks old designs and adds a lot

Complaints like this are better posted to the library group list... many
of the people are here too, anyway.

> of additional work. What I'm referring here is the change to LEDs and Diodes
> to the opposite polarity (see attachment).
> I wonder what has triggered such a decision.

That's because they were against the chosen standard (IPC with IEC as
second choice); no other particular reason. Luckily footprints are
embedded it the board so there is no immediate damage.

eeschema parts are instead referenced so they 'see' the library changes.
Can be painful :P imagine changing the order of the pins on an IC! At
the moment this is at least mitigated with the 'rescue' dialog when
there is a cache mismatch. AFAIK the new eeschema format is scheduled to
embed the parts like the board one (and finally no cache lib around).

> This is again an argument for _not_ using Kicad supplied libraries.

Well there are already some important technical reason for not using
them, especially if you don't use the same process they are designed
for. For example using the IPC recommended footprint for power inductors
causes too many delaminations on our boards! Or you simply don't like
how they are drawn (I like 0.01 courtyard lines instead of 0.05) or
categorized (also the old issue of naming the pins from the part or the
footprint...)

It's actually an issue for *every* EDA programs around, but you need to
give a standard library to 'sell' the product; as a fact of life
professional users will rebuild their footprints anyway (I use
perl/lisp/zsh scripts, and there is a whole industry out there ready to
sell you their footprints)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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