Until now I’m only experienced with legacy type Module handling. Upon a serious start with latest nightly build (bzr6169~29~ubuntu) I found myself in heavy experimenting until I found out the exact behaviour (note: git is familiar to me).
To my opinion, the new system is OK, but for those who want to have a copy of all footprints locally (e.g. for the seldom cases that one’s offline while working with Kicad, or whatever reason) there are some caveats. pcbnew has a Library Wizard which - I guess - makes the library-repos-install.sh superfluous.
My remarks:
It is a bit inpractical, that once upon saving a modified footprint, an error dialog is generated. It would be fine, if one could hit a yes-button, in order to automatically configure for local write to the active directory.
It seems NOT possible to arrange a change to local handling aver all libraries in one action, only each individual footprint category can be changed lo local at a time:
A quite tedious procedure to set read AND write in one action:
Preferences->Footprint Libraries Manager. Then select the desired library.
Then hit button Options Editor.
Cursor on “allow_pretty_writing_to_this_dir”, then button “<<Append Selected Options”.
Put path in new field entry.
This path should end with the name of the library, with .pretty suffix.
NOTES:
- the option is only stored (in .config/fp-lib-table) after the parent dialog is closed!
- the path must be present, otherwise a missing path error window is displayed upon footprint save attempt.
It is also possible to globally load all remote footprints via Preferences->Footprint Libraries Wizard.
NOTE: reading/listing footprints goes still via internet connection when the variable mentioned above is not set.
The alternative way to accomplish local read is to invoke the Wizard from the Footprint Libraries Manager, button “Append with wizard”.
This appends a copy of the footprint library with the local reference at the end of the table (low preference, only read when internet offline?).
My personal handling preference is as follows: Local access with following options. Both options require that the local directory is a simple git clone, i.e. contains a .git directory:
- Upon local access, pcbnew could alert me of a newer version in git.
- Instead, I could check git activity for each footprint library using e.g. gitk or similar, and at that time decide if I want to update parts (with some modification; gitk could even show the footprint graphically).
Disadvantage of full local storage: the Team’s intention to let the user ONLY store MODIFIED footprints for the sake of simple uploads to a maintainer is not affected when one is using a local git repository, which allows even an upload of patches per directory.