kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 1/17/2018 3:39 AM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 07:55:02AM +0000, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> As a user, 10000% agree.

Me too!  If users want to constantly update their libraries, that's
their choice but kicad installers should not be forcing this on users.
We should have a fixed set of libraries that are tagged for a release
series so users have consistent libraries to work with until the next
stable release.  I wouldn't be very happy if my libraries were
completely changed when I updated to a new point release of KiCad.
Users in corporate environments tend to value stability more than having
the latest libraries.

> 
>>
>>
>> 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
> 
>