kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/10/2016 2:02 PM, jp charras wrote:
> Le 10/05/2016 à 18:28, Chris Pavlina a écrit :
>> Part one of many to clean up pcbnew preferences and unify legacy vs GAL
>> options.
>>
>> This patch removes the option in legacy to hide via drills. As Tom
>> indicated[1], the layout should as much as possible be WYSIWYG, and if a via
>> has a drill it should show it. Therefore we chose to remove this option from
>> legacy rather than add it to GAL.
>>
>> This raises a question that needs to be resolved in a different way. There is a
>> possibility to create vias with undefined drill diameter, in which case they
>> will have whatever diameter the net class is set to. Legacy had an option to
>> indicate this will drill presence or absence: absence of a drill mark indicated
>> that the diameter was default.
>>
>> I believe this is a very bad way to do it and needs to be fixed. First of all,
>> if we *do* permit this behavior it needs to be shown in a different way. Hiding
>> the drill is a particularly poor approach, because the netclass drill diameter
>> changing can have destructive consequences for the layout, and it needs to be
>> obvious that this has happened. In my view it is very unobvious to someone not
>> familiar that this even exists, and hiding the drills subject to this behavior
>> makes it *worse*. If we're keeping the behavior, we need a better way to
>> indicate that drills are dynamically sized.
> 
> This is an opinion, which can be discussed.
> 
> AFAIK, since a long time the default via hole diameter does not exist. You can change the netclass
> drill diameter without changing the via drill diameter of existing vias.
> Therefore I do not see the problem you want to fix.
> 
> (The default via hole diameter can exist only in old boards)

Is here any reason to show any via hole diameter other than the actual
diameter that will be used when the board is plotted?  I cannot think of
any.  It makes sense to me to show the actual diameter of the via no
matter whether that diameter is defined in the netclass, default, or
some other setting.  I guess the tricky part is determining what the
that diameter actually is based on the all of the potential via diameter
settings.

> 
>>
>> Honestly I think the behavior needs to go away entirely and be replaced with a
>> new way to make drills match the net class. Orson suggested to me that there
>> could be a way to manually trigger an update of drill sizes. In GAL this can
>> already be done on a selection. I'd like a way to update all drills of a
>> certain size, though - for instance a quick "change drills that had the old
>> netclass size to the new netclass size". Thoughts?
>>
>> PLEASE, I'd like some input from people who actually do layout professionally,
>> if any are presently stalking the mailing list. The question of whether or not
>> things should change dynamically tends to be very important to them and I'd
>> like to know what they think.
>>
>> [1] https://misc.c4757p.com/pad/p/pcbnew-prefs
>>
>>
>>
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> 
>