It seems that the whole resque thing works pretty OK.
However, The resque dialog that pops up is very confusing and unintuitive.
I mean, you get presented with a “cache” and a “library” option and then get to select [Cancel] or [OK]. ???
In KiCad V4 I regularly used to rename the “-cache” file into a project specific library, (and add it to the top of the library list) because especially when archiving projects, I do not want them to be dependent on external libraries.
The way the resque dialog is presented could be much improved, by communicating better to the user what it actually does. For example:
KiCad has detected that you opened an old schematic, and the libraries with which this schematic was made are missing. This project does however has a cache file with a backup of your schematic symbols.
Do you want to copy these symbols to a project specific library?
[Yes] [No]
An improvement for me would be to add a library name for those symbols to be saved. Most of my old projects already have a project specific library, and I would much prefer to add those symbols to the already existing project specific library.
The other thing I may have mentioned earlier:
I do not really understand why anything needs to be resqued in the first place. If I were to write Kicad then the symbols in the “-cache” library would have precedence over some external library.
How can it ever be usefull if an existing good cached library symbol gets replaced by a defective library link, which results in questionmarks in your schematic?
Sometimes I think about filing a bug report about this, as I am convinced this could never have been intended behaviour. But for me the details of what actually goes wrong are to vague to file a decent bug report.
At the moment the “-cache” lib is an important part of the schematic, especially when reviewing a project from someone else (such as another forum member here). Just now I’ve been experimenting a bit more with it to get a better Idea of how it actually works. KiCad can re-construct the schematic if I delete either the “-cache” or the “-rescue” lib, but not if both are deleted. I find the whole resue thing weird and unnesaccary, as it has about the same info as the “-cache” lib.
Simply giving symbols in the -cache lib precedence over external libraries would make the whole resque thing unnecaddary.
I suspect this is the way V6 is going to work. I assume it integrates the “-cache” into the schematic file, and give it precedence over external libraries.
The first time I got confronted with a schematic full of square boxes with question marks I Panicked, and did not know how to recover.
It does not happen often, but I think I completely redrew a few schematics from the PDF’s I made of the schematics.
Later I learned I can edit the properties of those question mark symbols and can select other symbols from them from one of the libraries.
Other people probably feel the same, it may be a good idea to add a chapter about recovering a schematic from those questionmark symbols. They are quite frightening the first time you see them, while it is actually just a nuisance and not such a big deal, because the library and symbol names of the symbols are preserved.
I also like the: " Eeschema / Tools / Edit symbol fields" spreadsheet like editing of the symbol fields. It would be a nice addition if the library reference of the symbols could also be shown and edited here.
At the moment however, the question mark symbols do not even show up on this spreadsheet grid. This would make repairing damaged schematics a lot easier.
They are also ignored by annotation, which I find strange, but it does not matter much, as the first step should be to repair the library links anyway.
