On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 13:18:26 -0500, Wayne Stambaugh wrote: > I stumbled across your blog report this morning before your post to the > kicad dev mailing list and I'm having a difficult time figuring out what > your changes provide. The trickybox only seems to provide a visual > symbol for dangling connections where as a label does not. However, the > label still creates the physical connection between "dangling" wires > and/or buses be they on the same sheet or a different sheet. You can > test this for yourself by opening the video demo schematic and deleting > one of the labels from the root sheet and running the ERC. The ERC will > report unconnected wires and/or buses on other sheets as expected.
Certainly I expect the net connections to continue as they currently work. > In the past we've talked about actually using the netlister to close the > dangling state box (the little square at the end of an unconnected > object that has a connection point) when labels join dangling wires > and/or buses so it's obvious to the user when dangling wires and/or > buses actually have a connection. The problem with that approach is the > amount of time required to regenerate the netlist to determine the label > connectivity may cause UI delay issues. To be honest, we haven't tried > that yet so my concerns may be unfounded. My concern is to do with net lines which *might* be incorrectly dangling or *might* be deliberately dangling. It's that uncertainty which leads to the use of an explicit intra-sheet link element, just like the point of offering the no-connect element to allow engineers to state that they meant for that pin of a symbol to be unused. > FYI, we have frozen the existing file format because it is going to be > replaced during the current development cycle. Your changes require a > file format change which is not going to happen. I wish you would have > inquired about this on the kicad dev mailing list before you wrote your > code. We certainly can discuss added your changes to the new file format. I guessed that might be the case and I'm certainly not upset by the potential delays. > In the future, would you please post you ideas to the KiCad dev mailing > list rather than the Debian blog. I was rather surprised to see someone > doing some serious hacking on KiCad outside the project. It's always a > good idea to run things by the kicad dev mailing list first before you > start hacking on kicad just to get and idea what's going on in the > project. I consider developers time a precious resource so I hate to > see someone spend a lot of time hacking on kicad on something that we > may not be able to use because of other ongoing development. I did the original work, mostly to see how hard it'd be for me to hack on eeschema -- I wasn't under any illusion that this would be anything but a shot-from-the-dark for other KiCad developers, but I hate being the sort of person who shows up on a list, gets people interested in an idea, and then has no code to show for it. As someone used to things like the Linux kernel where code-is-king rules apply I tend to hack first, send RFC later :-) That my blog is aggregated to various places such as the Debian Planet is just a side-effect of the number of communities I find myself in, and was not intended in any way to be a mechanism to put pressure on yourself or others in the KiCad community. > Thank you in your interest in contributing to KiCad. I will take a look > at your concept when I get chance and comment on it. I look forward to any comments you have about the idea -- given your confusion above about the goals of the intra-sheet link elements, it's clear that despite my attempts to clarify the position, I still have failed to communicate it effectively. I shall think about other ways to do so. D. -- Daniel Silverstone http://www.digital-scurf.org/ PGP mail accepted and encouraged. Key Id: 3CCE BABE 206C 3B69 _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
