kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/22/2017 03:16 AM, Julius Schmidt wrote:
> It seems the current origin/master will modify schematic files on disk
> just by opening them -- even if I opt out of the remap tool. This is
> rather undesirable behaviour, I don't want files to become unreadable by
> the original version that created them just because I *opened* them.

First of all, you cannot opt out of remapping you schematic and expect
the library symbol links to continue to work correctly.  The symbol
library table is now the only way that library symbols are linked to
schematics symbols.  The only reason any of your symbols show up is that
they are still in the cache library.

> 
> I am also curious about this format change in general; if I understand
> this correctly, this is work leading up to the new schematics format; so
> if there is already a major breaking change planned, why the need for
> *another* breaking change?

This change is not just for the upcoming file format changes, it also
fixes a major bug that caused the wrong symbol to be linked in certain
situations and has been in the project forever.  It also unifies symbol
library access with with the footprint library design.

> 
> I'm also wondering whether the intent is to adopt the behaviour of the
> PCB tool regarding footprints entirely, which I find somewhat
> unsatisfactory; in particular the way it seems to have "hidden" copies
> of the footprints in the .kicad_pcb file can lead to awkward surprises;
> I would much rather have all symbol+footprint references be to a
> project-local library that contains a *single* copy of global
> symbols/footprints -- the old eeschema approximated this reasonably well
> with its cache library.

No it didn't.  You were just lucky.  IMO, the symbol cache library has
always been a disaster waiting to happen and it masked a lot of issues
with broken and modified symbol libraries.  Your desire to have a single
symbol footprint link is not shared by all.  Many users like the idea of
being able modify symbols in place like you can with footprints.  There
are many times I would like to tweak pin positions in symbols to make
schematics cleaner without having to have multiple variants of the same
symbol in my libraries.

Long story short, it's here to stay.  To be honest, users should be
comfortable with the library table concept by now since it's been around
for quite a while.

Cheers,

Wayne

> 
> Apologies if this comes across as too negative; I do appreciate the work
> that goes into switching eeschema to a new format.
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Julius
> 
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