Anool wrote about library management on Hackaday.
For people that are experienced (with KiCad or with CE), what’s your take on this?
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I have been caught out with the changed symbols a couple of time and was already thinking about the idea of cloning the library for a specific project. The copying of the cache seems it would be much smaller. I would need to try these out to see which I prefer. But there is certainly merit in associating the symbols and footprints to a project.
I have been following this discussion for awhile from lots of different people and I understand the work around. “Makin’ copies…”
Is this a common issue with other EDA tools?
It just seems odd. If every time I created a document in my favorite work processor I would have to make copies of all the fonts I needed to use, I would see that as really inefficient.
I do get that I may be stretching a bit as compared to hardware, but there has to be a better answer than having every engineer make copies of parts.
Maybe it would make sense to have some sort of versioning system for symbols and footprints. By default if you get a new version of KiCAD, you would keep using the version you used many years ago. You then have an option to accept the new versions of the symbols and footprints from eeschema and pcbnew by clicking on something that would let you replace them. This way you would control when you take on the risk of change.
Just my $.02.
To use your analogy, it’s more like you are creating your own custom font and if you want your document to look right you do need to keep the font along with the document. If everybody just used “courier new” it would be fine, but sometimes there are new ground breaking innovative fonts that nobody has tried yet.
That is definitely one perspective. For those that really enjoy building fonts (schematic symbols and footprints), I get it. I am definitely glad for having learned the skills.
But, I prefer to spend my time creating schematics and boards (documents/spreadsheets) as much as possible and only use those other skills as needed. I find a lot of value in learning how to ‘go deeper’ when needed but don’t desire to follow that approach for all tasks.
I prefer the GTD approach and am happy to use symbols/footprints developed by others.