I have reduced my problem to a very simple circuit shown in the attachment. The pcb associated with the schematic is missing the J1 connector. I would expect pcbnew DRC to catch this but it does not. Am I missing something here-this was a problem in a board I designed with a large number of connectors.
DRC does not check if the netlist is up to date. Which means it does not check if all symbols of the design are present as footprints. The tool responsible for that is the update pcb from schematic tool. And i think there is already a feature request to include a check like that in DRC.
OK–just to be clear—the netlist in both eschema and pcbnew are up to date and in-sync. All of the components in eschema have assigned footprints.
Running update-pcb found and added the missing connectors. However one connector became deleted in some followup edits. This missing connector was not detected in later DRC checks.
If the feature request is executed it is not a problem of course.