kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel,

I stumbled across your blog report this morning before your post to the
kicad dev mailing list and I'm having a difficult time figuring out what
your changes provide.  The trickybox only seems to provide a visual
symbol for dangling connections where as a label does not.  However, the
label still creates the physical connection between "dangling" wires
and/or buses be they on the same sheet or a different sheet.  You can
test this for yourself by opening the video demo schematic and deleting
one of the labels from the root sheet and running the ERC.  The ERC will
report unconnected wires and/or buses on other sheets as expected.

In the past we've talked about actually using the netlister to close the
dangling state box (the little square at the end of an unconnected
object that has a connection point) when labels join dangling wires
and/or buses so it's obvious to the user when dangling wires and/or
buses actually have a connection.  The problem with that approach is the
amount of time required to regenerate the netlist to determine the label
connectivity may cause UI delay issues.  To be honest, we haven't tried
that yet so my concerns may be unfounded.

FYI, we have frozen the existing file format because it is going to be
replaced during the current development cycle.  Your changes require a
file format change which is not going to happen.  I wish you would have
inquired about this on the kicad dev mailing list before you wrote your
code.  We certainly can discuss added your changes to the new file format.

In the future, would you please post you ideas to the KiCad dev mailing
list rather than the Debian blog.  I was rather surprised to see someone
doing some serious hacking on KiCad outside the project.  It's always a
good idea to run things by the kicad dev mailing list first before you
start hacking on kicad just to get and idea what's going on in the
project.  I consider developers time a precious resource so I hate to
see someone spend a lot of time hacking on kicad on something that we
may not be able to use because of other ongoing development.

Thank you in your interest in contributing to KiCad.  I will take a look
at your concept when I get chance and comment on it.

Cheers,

Wayne

On 2/29/2016 12:09 PM, Kaspar Emanuel wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> I read through your blog post, I will build your fork and test it out if
> I get a chance.
> 
> The extra ERC option seems useful indeed. I am a bit confused about the
> intra-sheet link feature though, is this different from global labels?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Kaspar
> 
> P.S. Might I suggest a different favicon for your blog? The current one
> isn't very welcoming.
> 
> On 29 February 2016 at 15:16, Daniel Silverstone
> <dsilvers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:dsilvers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     A couple of weeks ago I posted about my intra-sheet links and
>     dangling wire ERC
>     work which I had undertaken in part to see how hard it'd be to hack on
>     eeschema, and in part because it was a set of features I missed from
>     when I
>     used to work in Mentor Graphics' Designview workflow.
> 
>     I have since rebased the patch series found at:
> 
>          https://github.com/kinnison/kicad-source-mirror
> 
>     (interlinks branch)
> 
>     On recent master (on Saturday in fact) and verified that it still
>     seems to
>     behave okay.  I then sat down and wrote a blog post about the work I'd
>     done, its features, and then a bit of a story about how it might be used
>     in anger.
> 
>          http://blog.digital-scurf.org/posts/intralinks/
> 
>     I realise that it's a lot to ask for people to start poking at stuff,
>     especially when the patches are not being posted to the list; but at
>     this time
>     I'm not after code review (that will come later when I've tidied the
>     code up,
>     should I get enough interest); but rather in a review of the concept
>     and idea
>     behind intra-sheet link elements.
> 
>     If anyone does have the time and inclination to give the blog post a
>     read, and
>     even better, if after that the inclination to give the code a quick
>     play with,
>     I would appreciate any and all feedback which doesn't center around
>     the fact
>     that my editor has managed to tabify certain bits of the diff.  I
>     promise I'll
>     convert those back to spaces if I submit patches to the list :-)
> 
>     D.
> 
>     --
>     Daniel Silverstone                         http://www.digital-scurf.org/
>     PGP mail accepted and encouraged.            Key Id: 3CCE BABE 206C 3B69
> 
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