kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/9/2019 2:18 PM, Jeff Young wrote:
> Hi Wayne,
> 
>> On 9 Nov 2019, at 19:05, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Hey Jeff,
>>
>> On 11/9/2019 12:06 PM, Jeff Young wrote:
>>> I’m working through the project Save As feature.
>>>
>>> I currently have it renaming the top-level files, updating the symbol and footprint lib tables, updating paths in Gerber job files, and updating paths and filenames in the netlist.  
>>>
>>> A couple of questions:
>>>
>>> 1) The netlist I’m handling is a .net file which contains s-expressions.  Are there other formats I need to worry about?  Do they also use .net, or some other extension(s)?
>>
>> I don't think you need to copy files that are generated by KiCad such as
>> netlist, gerber, and 3D model files.  These can all be regenerated from
>> the new project.
> 
> Yeah, I thought about that (particularly in the case of a DRC report file).  I was sort of thinking it would be nice to keep them when we can, but not in the case of the DRC (as we can’t guarantee that there aren’t non-discriminate cases in the save-as algorithm, and we don’t want to certify a board as having passed DRC in that case).
> 
>>
>>>
>>> 2) Mention was made of updating sheet paths in .sch files.  However, those never refer to the top-level schematic, do they?  If other sheet paths are absolute then we shouldn’t update them, and if they’re relative then we don’t need to update them.  Or am I missing something?
>>
>> Relative paths will need to be updated if they are not contained in the
>> current project path and the new saved project path is at a different
>> branch depth in the path tree.  Example: a sheet schematic path is
>> ../some_other_path/some_other.sch and the project is saved to
>> ../one_node_deeper/project_saved_as/, the sheet schematic path would
>> have to be adjusted to ../../some_other_path/some_other.sch in order for
>> the schematic to load correctly.  This is the primary reason this
>> feature does not exist yet.  It's not as trivial as it would seem to
>> implement unless you don't care about breaking the saved as project.
> 
> I really don’t think we want to touch paths with “..” in them.  How do we know the user isn’t cloning a whole tree, and that the target of the relative path is also getting saved-as and they want to keep the relative path the same?  We won’t generate that path automatically, so the user “owns” it.

This is exactly why I never tackled this one.  Anytime your are trying
to deal with complex relative path changes, the code gets rather messy.
 I doubt this will affect many users but you can be rest assured of a
bug report if you get it wrong.

> 
> Cheers,
> Jeff.
> 
>>
>>>
>>> 3) What about legacy schematic and/or board files?  Any paths in those?
>>
>> Any relative 3D model paths suffer from the same problem described
>> about.  I'm not sure the 3D path code allows for relative 3D model paths.
>>
>> That's all I can think of at the moment but that doesn't mean there are
>> not other issues that I've missed.
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jeff.
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>>
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>