kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/2/2016 2:08 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 02:01:23PM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>> You are correct.  A symbol (power or otherwise) is not a component.  It
>> is a symbolic representation of a component or anything else that needs
>> to represented that is useful when designing PCBs.
> 
> ...except that it is a SCH_COMPONENT. If we're going to emphasize that
> symbols and components are not the same thing, we should probably
> clarify that the codebase calls them incorrectly  ;)

..and libraries use LIB_PART just to make things more confusing.  I'll
have to give symbol types some serious thought to make sure they are
easy to extend without making a mess of the code to handle them and the
file formatting.

> 
> 
>> ... Power symbols are
>> useful for ERC.  What about net ties?  There is no component involved
>> with a net-tie yet it has a footprint that represents the user's desired
>> connection pattern in a PCB.  I've seen other EDA products allow for
>> virtual (in BOM but not in netlist) symbols for creating BOMs that
>> include hardware that are not directly part of the PCB.  Sure, we could
>> represent each of those objects differently both internally and what we
>> present to the user but they are all so similar in scope that the symbol
>> concept makes sense.  If we want to present these "special" symbols to
>> the user as something else, I'm fine with that but I'm not sure how
>> useful that is but internally they can still be represented as symbols.
>>
>>>
>>> It really is (or at least should be) nothing more than a specialized global net label.
>>>
>>> -a
>>
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