kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/22/2017 10:35 AM, Julius Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 22 Nov 2017, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> 
>> 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 see. So I cannot look at old schematics files without converting them
> to the new format. I understand the technical reasons but the act of
> opening modifying a file on-disk that breaks it for older versions
> is not something I'd ever expect a program to do.
> 
> So basically to look at older files I should keep an older version of
> kicad around ...

Only if you don't want to take advantage of the features in the upcoming
version 5 release of KiCad.  Otherwise, remap them.  Once remapped, they
will no longer be compatible with older versions of KiCad which is our
policy.  We attempt to do our best to maintain backwards compatibility.
There is no guarantee of forward compatibility nor will there ever be
unless there is a dramatic increase in idle developer time.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> Do you have an example at hand?

There are multiple bug reports filed against this issue.  I'm not going
to rehash this for the 100th time.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> I understand the desire to have modified versions of symbols, but it
> also seems to make centralised updates of symbols impossible, at least
> not without losing these changes, which in the case of swapped pins
> could be rather disastrous. (Yes, with the multiple copies approach you
> have to edit each copy individually, but at least it's explicit what's
> going on). Though I guess you could keep the old version and check if it
> was locally modified before replacing.
> 
> I know this may be just personal preference, but when a wrong change
> could cost me a lot of money I'd much prefer my software to be as
> explicit about them as possible.

I believe the text in the remapping dialog explains the process.  I also
created a blog post on the website and made an announcement on the kicad
user forums.  I don't really no what else to do.  The expectation that
thing wont change or get broken in development builds is unrealistic.
If you require project stability, you should stick to the stable release
of KiCad.

> 
> Sorry, really not trying to impose my views on anyone, just curious
> about the mindset behind these things.
> 
> 
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