kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Diego Herranz <diegoherranz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Related to this, I'm migrating an old design (~2 month old nightly) to the
current master. First I faced some problem with '/' characters (
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg31705.html) but there have
been some improvements since then so I'm trying again.

When opening the schematic, 2 dialogs are shown:
1) Rescue symbols dialog: it offers to rescue a couple of symbols which use
'/' in their name. It seems to rescue them properly on xxxx-rescue.lib
(replacing '/' by '_')
2) Remap dialog: Everything gets remapped properly except the symbols
mentioned in 1). That is because xxxx-rescue.lib is not in sym-lib-table
yet. After adding it to sym-lib-table, I can edit those broken symbols
("?")  to point those rescued in xxxx-rescue.lib and it all looks OK.

After this, which I think that can be challenging for many people (it has
been for me), it seems everything should be OK now. However when I push the
netlist to pcbnew, it shows a few changes and I wasn't expecting any.
Comparing the schematic file with a text editor a few wires have been
modified.

I've don't some testing it seems the wires get modified when doing 1). If I
skip the rescue, no wire gets modified.

Why is that happening? I wouldn't expect the rescue process to modify
wires. Am I doing something wrong?

Many thanks,
Diego



On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 3:00 PM, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> On 11/24/2017 05:01 PM, hauptmech wrote:
> > On 25/11/17 02:14, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> >> This is *the* fatal flaw with the cache library.  User's assume it is
> >> stale symbols or a temporary copy.  It is not.  It is a snapshot of the
> >> current library symbols linked to the symbols in the schematic.  It gets
> >> refreshed every time the schematic is saved.  Once you delete this file
> >> or keep an out of date copy using cvs, all bets are off.  It is only a
> >> matter of time before one of your symbol libraries changes or gets
> >> removed and you will end up with a broken schematic.  The rescue code
> >> depends on the cache being up to date in order preserve you schematic.
> >> If the cache is not current, the rescuing cannot be guaranteed.
> >
> > I don't think it's necessarily a flaw. And your description above is
> > indeed a cache. That's not a bad thing. I recall that I left it out of
> > version control because I wanted to make sure fixes to my symbols were
> > always propagated to the design. In the repo I'm referencing for this
> > discussion I had 10 project files all using the same local library. I
> > didn't want to have to manually update each schematic to propagate
> > changes. Deleting untracked files was what I did instead. At the time no
> > one was making breaking changes to system installed symbols, so the
> > system libs were stable for this workflow.
> >
> > I'm trying think of the least effort way to migrate an old design in
> > these circumstances.
> >
> > Can we have the rescue code fail if no cache file is found? That at
> > least lets the user know they are in uncharted territory. Then if a lot
> > of users come complaining you will know if it is worth doing a bit more
> > in the rescue code.
> >
> > If the cache is not available during rescue you can load a copy of the
> > libraries that were current at the schematic save date and either
> > re-cache them or rescue them directly. But this is only worth doing if a
> > significant number of users are affected.
>
> AFAIK, the rescue code doesn't do anything if there is not cache file
> because the cache file is used for the comparison.  I actually
> considered adding a check on schematic load to warn the user with a list
> of all of symbols linked to the cache library so they could fix them.
> I'm not sure this is desirable but at least users would know that
> symbols were missing from their libraries and the links were falling
> back to the cache which is tenuous at best.
>
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