kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Matthijs Kooijman <matthijs@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Wayne,

> KiCad should not be determining which libraries get loaded just because
> our library layout gets more complex.  I would reject any design changed
> that loaded libraries outside the users control.  Maybe I'm misreading
> this but it kind of sounds like that to me.
My proposal would indeed be to load libraries, without the user
configuring each individual library. However, the user would configure
the entire thing (e.g. "load *all* libraries from the default
distribution") and can disable the entire thing (and load libraries
individually) if he wants more control.

As a user, that is exactly the amount of control I want. I don't realy
care about which official libraries are in my library list exactly, I
just want all of them so I have the broadest choice in components and
footprints.

Additionally, I don't really want to think about this when upgrading. If
I upgrade the libraries package, I really want to still be able to just
use all official libraries, without having to check after each upgrade
if there is perhaps a new .lib file that was not there before (which, I
think, involves removing them all and re-adding them as the easiest way
to do that). Currently, if some symbols are split off into a new
library, and I forget to check this, they will silently disappear from
my choice of symbols, and I might not even realize this (and simply
assume a symbol I am looking for does not exist yet).

Even if I wanted to go through the trouble of checking the library list
on upgrades, I might not always actually realise that I've upgraded when
using distribution packages that get upgraded as part of a bigger
upgrade.

What I write here is how *I* would like to see things as a user. I can
imagine this applies to more, if not most, users as well.


One additional caveat I recently realized: Even if you would
automaticlaly update the list of libraries, you will additionally need
to rename/remap some symbols, since symbol references include the
library name in v5. One way I can imagine this works is to also include
a "rename" specification (perhaps similar to the current rename.json),
which can be used by KiCad to automatically migrate older symbol
references. Or perhaps the rescue dialog can be improved to look among
other libraries for a symbol with the same name and let the user choose
between relinking to such a symbol, or resueing one from the cache.

Gr.

Matthijs

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