kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[James Jackson <james.a.f.jackson.2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Jeff - I'll take a look at a nightly to see where things are now.
Sounds like a much better selection strategy too!

Jean-Pierre - You're quite right to highlight these complications, which
I've been mulling over myself. I don't yet have proposed solutions, but I'm
going to give it a good think.

Your comments on multi-part units would I think, at least partially, be a
problem even now. For example, if I have one unit providing power on one
sheet, and another unit on a sheet that gets annotated alone, they could
become broken.

Thinking out loud, in cases where a unit is nested in a hierarchy, it would
make sense to keep the annotation of an already-annotated unit at a higher
level in the hierarchy (towards the root schematic), and to
forward-propagate the annotation to units at a lower level in the
hierarchy. I'll need to think about ways to handle when units in different
sheets are at at the same hierarchy level, or in different
hierarchical trees with no unit in a common root. That would arguably be
messy design, but it's a possibility so should be handled.

Of course, anything is an implementation decision, and users should neither
be surprised by what a feature does, or have things done that they don't
know about. I.e. there should be some warnings to the user if some form of
forward, back, or sideways propagation to units not in the currently
annotation scope (selection or sheet) are going to be updated. I presume
there is an algorithm already which tracks the annotation of multi-part
units (by counting sub-units remaining? Or...) - so I'll study that and see
what it does currently too.

Yours,
James.

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 7:28 PM jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Le 07/05/2020 à 20:15, Jeff Young a écrit :
> > Hi James,
> >
> > You might first want to download one of the nightlies (5.99) and play
> with it.  Block selections are gone: eeschema now has a “normal” selection
> model where you click on things and/or drag-select and they get highlighted.
> >
> > So from the GUI perspective you’d just need to add the options to the
> Scope section of the Annotate dialog.
> >
> > I believe there’s already a Wishlist item for this in the issue database.
> >
> > I suck at git, so you don’t want to know what I do for branching, etc. ;)
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Jeff.
> >
>
> Annotating just a selected area is not trivial:
>
> - What about multi-units components: for instance what about renaming 2 of
> 5 units when one unit is the unit handling the power pins?
> this is the best way to break a design.
> - What about complex hierarchies: selecting an area selects in fact as
> many areas as sheet instances.
>
> - and what about multi-units components in complex hierarchies.
>
> Good luck with block annotation.
>
> --
> Jean-Pierre CHARRAS
>
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