On Wed, 22 Nov 2017, Andy Peters wrote:
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.
The difference is that, presumably, Altium does not modify the files
on disk if you do not save.
This is really my core complaint, I don't expect kicad to be able to
modify old projects and save back into the old format.
I do expect it to be able to open them without damaging the files.