kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

I finally finish up the initial attempt at simple inheritance for the
symbol library code.  The change is non-trivial and will likely have
some unexpected side affects that I missed.  I pushed the branch to my
personal repo[1] and I would like a few pair of extra eyes on it before
I merge it into master.  If you prefer, I can set up a merge request
from this branch in Launchpad.

The biggest user facing change is that the concept of aliases is gone
which means internally, the LIB_ALIAS object has been removed and all of
the information it managed was moved into LIB_PART.  This actually
simplified some of the UI code but made the LIB_MANAGER and LIB_PART
object code more complicated.  The symbol library editor works
significantly different now.  When you select a derived part (formerly a
LIB_ALIAS), it will show the parent symbol that it was derived from
darkened and all of the edit features disabled.  Until the new symbol
file format is done and writing to the legacy symbol file format is
deprecated, this restriction will have to remain in place.  The
properties editor no longer has an aliases panel and is limited to what
it can change in the derived or parent symbols depending on which symbol
is currently being edited.  I suspect this will be the biggest stumbling
block for existing users so if you can think of a better way to handle
this, I'm open to suggestion.  The other thing that I am concerned about
is symbol library editing.  There were a lot of LIB_MANAGER object
changes which I am not 100% confident in.

Just a couple of other internal changes to be aware of:

A flattened copy of the symbol is used in SCH_COMPONENT instead of
relying on the weak reference to the library symbol.  This way we don't
have to worry about the shared pointer disappearing and causing issues.
However, this will require that we be diligent about updating modified
symbol libraries in the schematic.  Otherwise, the schematic could
change the next time it is loaded.  I'm open to changing this back if we
think it's going to be an issue.

There is now a compare function for the LIB_PART object which can be
rather tricky.  I created a new test suite inside the current LIB_PART
test file so if you change anything, please run the test to ensure
nothing gets broken.  I also added a bunch of other new tests for the
LIB_PART object.

I added code to DIALOG_SHIM to allow the caller to reset the last dialog
size when hiding dialog control state changes between dialog instances.
We have some dialog windows that are not the correct default size
depending on which controls are shown so there is now a convenient way
to address this.

Please let me know if you find anything so I can get it fixed and merged
into master.  The next step is to convert the schematic internal units
from 1mil to 10nm.  Once that step is complete, I will knock out the new
symbol library format.  Thanks in advance for the help.

Cheers,

Wayne

[1]:https://code.launchpad.net/~stambaughw/kicad/+git/kicad-dev/+ref/lib-alias-merge