kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Diego Herranz <diegoherranz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Rene.

Thanks for bringing this up. I've never liked hidden power pins. In my
opinion, the python philosophy applies here too: "Explicit is better than
implicit."

How many libraries will need this?
I'm asking because, if we went for option 3 (or 2), will we end up with a
lot of nearly identical duplicated libraries? That can be very confusing
for users and for maintaining the GitHub libraries (e.g. getting pull
requests for the old libraries instead of the new ones, etc.).
And at some point we would need to get rid of the old ones anyway not to
carry them forever, won't we?

I'm wondering whether we can for option 1 if we evaluate what the behaviour
would be regarding ERC, symbol rescue, etc.

Thanks,
Diego

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 9:42 PM Rene Pöschl <poeschlr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
> Sadly we did not come around to fix all symbols before the v5 release.
> We now seem to have a volunteer who would be prepared to fix these symbols.
>
> There is a catch though. Whatever we do to fix this it will break
> designs that use the old symbols right now.
>
>
> So we have a few options:
>
> - 1 - Change the symbols inside the library and inform the users about
> this fix. (Will break current designs as the power pins will no longer
> be connected automatically. This after all is the point of the fix. Not
> sure if rescue is reliable enought to chatch that. ERC might also not
> complain if we put the power pins onto a separate unit.)
>
> - 2 - Add a separate library that holds the fixed symbols, keep the old
> one but remove it from the template library table. This means no designs
> are borken as old users do not get the new lib added without an explicit
> action on their part.
>
> - 3 - Rename the library before fixing it. add the new lib to the lib
> table. This would still break designs. (But in a different way. In this
> case the symbol might simply not be found. This is something that the
> rescue stuff should deal with.) In addition users will get an error
> message when starting eeschema or the symbol editor that alerts them
> about a missing file. (So if we make an announcement that includes the
> error message they should find it when they google for it.)
>
>
> My personal vote would be for option 3.
>
>
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