kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Personally I'm in favor of bumping the version with every feature. I can't see
it getting too annoying on the development branch, as people who use that
generally keep it up to date anyway - and I think it's sane to require them to.
Either use a release, or use development head. :)

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 11:52:08AM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> On 4/7/2016 9:47 AM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> > 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:
> 
> JPs rounded rectangle commit is a problem.  I did not have a chance to
> review JP's patch.  I would have recommended a file version bump.
> 
> Angled text support should not be a problem.  Text angles are already
> saved as floating point numbers so using angles other than 0, 90, 180,
> and 270 should not cause any issues but that hasn't been tested.
> 
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Older versions of Pcbnew will fail to load because the new board file
> rounded rectangle tokens are not supported by the stable release board
> file parser.
> 
> The angled text may be more problematic because the file will load but
> what happens when the text displayed may lead to some interesting results.
> 
> > 
> > 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 be out of date"-style warning if it's too high a number.
> 
> Makes sense to me.  Warning the user that the file may not load in
> advance is probably more friendly than the file parser error that will
> be displayed when the file fails to load.
> 
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> I will merge it into the stable branch when it's available.
> 
> > 
> > 3. Adopt a policy of properly bumping the version number any time a feature is
> > added.
> 
> I agree that adding new features should bump the file format version.
> Whether we should do this for once each feature or once each development
> cycle is debatable.  I tend to lean towards each feature but we should
> coordinate file system changes and attempt to make changes to the parser
> and output formatter in bulk even if we do not implement the features at
> that time.  Otherwise we could bump the file revision multiple times
> during each development cycle which could get annoying depending on the
> frequency of file version changes.
> 
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> > 
> > -- Chris
> > 
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