I think if you provide lite packages somewhere it will get publicised and then newbies will get into strife again.
Perhaps the lite package should check for the existence of the standard library directories on startup and provide a do not show this again checkbox for experts who have their own libraries?
A long time ago it was a great relief to find a program that could resume a download when it was interrupted. Gosh, those times when you had your PC turned on overnight in the hope a download would be finished in the morning…
In these modern times it’s pretty much automatic and it’s rare a download takes more then a few minutes (That is, for me at least).
And I wonder, if it would be useful to set up a torrent for distributing KiCad? I don’t know how the initial thing works, but I think I can manage to set it up t help with seeding.
I think we have some work to do on the UX of recovering from a bad library table state before we publish lite versions that are easy to find.
The “help - about KiCad - copy version info” process doesn’t capture any library information. If we start getting inexperienced users running 6.0.10 with an ancient library, we have the possibility of even more muddle if the error cause is a broken symbol or footprint.
The libraries are gradually being cleaned up, but there are still errors to be fixed.
I downloaded the latest testing lite installer it’s 6.0.10-2 so this is good enough for me.
It would be nice to have some kind of “library search tool”. I’ve seen several threads of damaged or missing library tables, and the usual recommendation is to delete the whole config directory (or at least the sym-lib-table and fp-lib-table) files, and this is a very crude method.
Such a tool could:
Many months back I wrote a KiCad 6 configuration check tool for the library tables here: GitHub - retiredfeline/kicad6cfgchk
It’s not that useful because it requires Python knowledge to install (to get the S-expression parser). Maybe if it were packaged as a plugin. But most of the people who hit library table problems are just starting off and using plugins would be beyond them. So for such people the big mallet, removing the config directory, works.
Probably it’s more useful for the KiCad application to have a self-check feature that can be invoked at any time to find problems.
Anyway it was a nice excursion (incursion?) into programming for a few hours.
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