kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Oliver Walters <oliver.henry.walters@xxxxxxxxx>]

To the package maintainers:

There has been a lot of movement of late by the library team, with a view
to improve (vastly) the quality of the symbol libraries.

The major change is our plan to reorganize the symbol libraries to bring
some consistency - currently they are scattered and there is no real rhyme
or reason to library convention.

Reference - https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library/issues/1402

This is a big change - so much so that I would like to retain a separation
between the current symbol libraries (for legacy compatibility). My
suggestion is to enact the new symbols in a new repository:

<http://goog_1316844941>
https://github.com/kicad/kicad-symbols

We currently have a separate discussion underway as to how we manage
migration to the new repository (or whether we simply make a block change
to the current one) - https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library/issues/1415

A further very important note is that there is a new repository for 3d
models, which is of far higher quality - https://github.com/kicad/packages3d

This repository should supersede the 3d models currently located in the
kicad-library repository. This also brings a functional separation between
the symbol libraries and the 3d library, which is fantastic.


My goal for release concurrent with KiCad v5 is thus:

a) Mark kicad-library as legacy and don't package with v5
b) Package kicad-symbols as the symbol libraries
c) Package packages3d as the 3D model libraries

I'm not 100% on top of how the packaging takes place so if there are any
good reasons that this should not take place as I have laid out above,
please let me know now.

The footprint libraries will remain as they are for v5. I have some ideas
there but they require a lot more work - this is the first step towards the
KiCad Library Management Manifesto (evil laugh).

Regards,
Oliver