Are settable clearances useful to anyone?

[hauptmech]

@PCB_Wiz You make a really good point about @dnotq’s thread getting hijacked by this topic.

In response to this

@PCB_Wiz

They say this “- we are planning to overhaul the clearance/design rules system in V6.Storing the clearance DIRECTLY for each track segment/via will conflict with any more sophisticated design rule management system.”

I can see merit in clearance-by-segment, as it is easy to explain, but it is manually focused, and not compatible with Autorouters. If you rip-up a trace, the clearance info is lost.Being manual in nature, it also consumes many mouse clicks, and is less compatible with more formal design rule definitions (which avoid operator over-rides)

One of the developers said this, but I don’t agree with him that storing clearance directly will conflict with a more sophisticated system, and I have not seen any other devs agree with him either.

Currently track width is automatic by netclass and yet being able to manually set the clearance when there is an exception that netclass can’t handle is something that you can do. My improvement only does the same with clearance. It does not prevent any more sophisticated automatic clearance heuristic from doing it’s thing. It just allows one to manually set the clearance when there is an exception to the rules.