kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'm targeting this email primarily at Wayne as versioning and release policy is
involved.

We've got a bit of a problem right now. We're currently adding features to the
pcbnew format - JP just merged rounded-rect pads and has a patch in development
for custom pads, and I'm looking at a patch to add angled fields. Problem is:

1. We're not bumping the file format version, so even though we're writing
files that contain features (actual COPPER features!) that old versions won't
understand, we're not marking them as such, so they'll either give nasty
file-corrupted errors, or fail to load silently.

2. Even if we did, pcbnew currently ignores the format version.


I propose the following:

1. Patch pcbnew to check the format version and give a friendly "your KiCad may
be out of date"-style warning if it's too high a number.

2. Accelerate this patch to a minor stable release to get it out there before
these new features make it into the next major release.

3. Adopt a policy of properly bumping the version number any time a feature is
added.

Thoughts?

-- Chris