kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On Nov 22, 2017, at 8:35 AM, Julius Schmidt <aiju@xxxxxxxxxx> 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 …

This “touching” of projects occurs with more applications than I can count. For example: every time I want to view a completed Altium project and I change layer visibility, Altium marks the layout as modified. It asks me if I want to save the file before closing the application.

The solution I’ve found is: let the tool do whatever it wants to do, then simply don’t save the files after you’re doing viewing them. At the very least, make a copy of the project before viewing. My projects are in a Subversion repository, so it’s a simple matter of checking out a new working copy, and then deleting the working copy when I’m done.

-a