kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

I just committed the initial schematic I/O plugin code.  It only
supports the schematic file parsing at the moment but soon it should
support schematic output formatting.  Symbol library loading and saving
will follow shortly there after.  By default, the new is built but it is
not used.  The current code is used in the default build config.  I
created a new build config option USE_SCH_IO_MANAGER to enable using the
plugin.  Set -DUSE_SCH_IO_MANAGER=ON in your config to enable it.  I've
been using round tripping (parse the file with the new parser and saving
to a new file with the current formatter and comparing the result) to
test the parser and I get identical files for every schematic except for
the interf_u demo (see below) so I feel pretty good about it's
stability.  You also get the added benefit of knowing where in the file
a parser error occurs.  One major difference is that if a parse error
occurs, the schematic will not continue to load the schematic.  I never
really liked that design in current parser.  The current parser is
syntactically very loose.  I wrote the new parser to be much more strict
so there coud be some issues on older schematics.  I tested some demo
schematic files from product branch r800 and they parsed fine but I'm
sure there will be a few that do not.  I would appreciate help from the
devs with testing this.  Particularly if you have any really old
schematic files laying around.  If you find any that fail, please send
them to me so I can fix the parser.

For some reason, either the current parser or the output formatter for
the BITMAP object is broken.  At first I thought it was my new parser
but I tested the existing code and the bug is there as well.  You can
test this by opening eeschema in the stand alone mode, open the
interf_u.sch file, save the file to a new name, and do a diff between
the two files and you will see that the last byte of the bitmap data has
changed.  This also happens in the stable release.  I couldn't see any
visible difference in the bitmaps but it's still a bit odd and should be
fixed at some point.

Package devs, please continue to build packages as you currently do.
Once the new plugin code is complete and tested, I will make it the
default config.  Many thanks in advance for the help.  Hopefully it's
not too buggy. :)

Cheers,

Wayne