kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Carsten Schoenert <c.schoenert@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

the following is clearly something about which hasn't a priority for the
current 5.0.0 finalization work.

I was thinking about also packaging the digikey-kicad-library [1] for
Debian. This is more an easy task so basically I've got a running
package which I can use in KiCad.

But ... the integration of the symbols and footprints is a bit boring
and time consuming as e.g. the adding of the various symbol libraries
needs to be done manually for every .lib file. And there are 143 of them! :)

The footprint editor has a wizard which helps to decrease the amount of
manually work but the user also needs to know there to find the .pretty
folder which may be for not well experienced user difficult.

So how could this be improved?
The footprint library wizard is basically a good thing and the symbols
editor should get a similar thing.
But I was also thinking about some more flexibility which could be used
by the packagers. So the following should be also usable and practical
on Windows Systems.

What about adding KiCad some intelligence to also look for files named
'subpackage.sym-lib-table' which are automatically included by the
schematic editor to expand or signalize the existence of more schematic
symbols from third parties? The search path for such files I'd lean
against the global file 'sym-lib-table' so first look at
/usr/share/kicad/template/ and /usr/share/kicad/library/ but also
locally in ~/.config/kicad
The format should be the same as the global symbol file.

The same could be done for the footprint editor?

And the editor(s?) could pick up that information and put some
(de)selection method within a dedicated tab for the submodul.

These are some ideas that are going around in my head, I don't know if
this would be doable or this is fully useful. But I'd like to see if the
management of the symbol libraries and also the footprint libraries
could be made much more easier.

[1] https://github.com/digikey/digikey-kicad-library

-- 
Regards
Carsten