kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx>]

What modifications are made to the wires?

2017-11-25 21:28 GMT+01:00 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 or keep an out of date copy using cvs, all bets are off.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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>
>
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