kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

 I noticed that the v6 roadmap has an item to merge the kicad step
export. Although this is not difficult to do, I don't think it's a
good idea because OCE/OCC does crash occasionally for various reasons
and I wouldn't want it to take down kicad when it does crash.  As long
as the exporter runs as a separate process we have the opportunity to
check the exit code and inform the user if the process had crashed,
but if it runs in the same process then kicad simply blinks out of
existence.  Of course we could always assure that all data is saved
prior to a STEP export so at least no data will be lost, but I still
think this is a clumsy way to do things and we're at the mercy of a
very complex third party tool behaving. The down side to using a
separate process of course is that its parser needs to be kept up to
date with any changes in the pcb format file, especially any new
features which affect the mechanical model.

Cirilo