Hello all! My name is Andras Tantos. I'm new to this group, but a relatively long-time user of KiCAD. I would like to suggest a change to the way KiCAD determines if annotation is needed for a schematic.
*Right now* the behavior is that if any reference ends with a '?' or not end with a number, the schematic is deemed not fully annotated. Since only fully annotated schematics can be synchronized, this prevents updating the PCB from the schematic. *The suggested new behavior* would be to relax this and only deem the schematic unannotated if more than one component has the same reference, or if any of them have a terminal '?'. *Examples:* placing a single capacitor with reference 'C' would be OK. Placing a second capacitor with the same reference would now force annotation. If the reference of the first capacitor is changed to 'BYPASS_C', the schematic would be considered fully annotated. If a capacitor with reference 'C?' is placed, the schematic is considered unannotated until the name is changed, even if only a single such entity exists. Obviously multi-part symbols allow replication of reference. So, if U_CPU has two units (A and B), that's fine. If there are two unit A-s with the same reference (U_CPU again for the sake of argument) that would trigger annotation. *Why?* This annotation logic aligns better with other packages such as Altium. Apart from the user-education part, this is important for imported projects: these schematic and PCB files can violate assumptions about component naming after import and would be impossible to synchronize further changes between PCB and schematic. *Why not?* It's a change to existing behavior. Things that didn't work before would start working and can cause confusion. Libraries are usually developed with no '?' in the reference name, so as long as a single component is placed on the schematic no annotation would be triggered. This could potentially be confusing for users. I have created a fork where I implemented this change. It seems to be working (CI is still running) and is ready for a pull-request. I wanted to have a discussion about it before submitting it though. Thanks, Andras -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KiCad Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to devlist+unsubscr...@kicad.org. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/6af07dfc-2ccb-46d2-9fb5-73bc7516ac95n%40kicad.org.
