kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

We do always show either the correct diameter or nothing at all. Thankfully
never a *different* diameter, or else I'd have raised a stink long ago! ;) What
I'd like to change is that it's even an option to show nothing at all. If
there's a hole through the board, it should be shown, period.

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 02:09:17PM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> 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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> > 
> > 
> 
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