kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 15.12.2016 20:02, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> The addition of (diff_pair_gap) and (diff_pair_width) has made it such
> that NO PCBs made with 'master' builds can now be loaded in the 4.0
> branch. Would a patch be accepted to do one of the following, to be
> added to the 4.0 branch to ease future conversion from 4 to 5?
> 
> 1. Fully backport saving diff pair dimensions to v4, but only write them
>    to the file if they already existed in it at load. This way, v4
>    writes files compatible with older v4 by default, but if editing a
>    v5 file will not lose the data.
> 
> or:
> 2. Specifically ignore these options on load, since dropping them
>    doesn't actually lose any PCB objects.
> 
> or:
> 3. Update the version number checker code I wrote before to have both
>    Warnings and Errors, using Warnings when ignoring the unknown object
>    and loading the board anyway will not lead to "important" data loss.
>    Add these attributes to a list of unknown objects that generate
>    Warnings.

How about adding an additional section in the .pcb/.sch files describing
all objects used together with required versions and their descriptions,
e.g:

(object-info

	(object "diff_pair_gap" ( minimum_version 4 ) ( severity warning )
(message "This file contains differential pair gap settings that come
with XXXX version of Kicad. Older versions will not respect the defined
gap settings ) )

	(object "fancy_geom_shape" ( minimum_version 12345 ) ( severity error )

)

Cheers,
Tom