kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 07/04/2016 17:52, Wayne Stambaugh a écrit :
> 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.

It can be done now. This is not too late.
Just I need to know if the new version is 5 or 4.1 (adding rounded rect pads is a minor change,
because the file format does not change when rounded rect pads are not used)
For me, a major change is more when new features are always stored in file, and the file can be
never read by older versions.

> 
> 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.

I tested that and did not see issues.
(AFAIK, the text rotation is fully supported by Pcbnew because the footprint rotation (therefore the
texts rotation) is defined in 0.1 degrees).

> 
>>
>> 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 be out of date"-style warning if it's too high a number.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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-- 
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS