One of the new features I’ve seen mentioned for KiCad 8 is ‘nested symbol inheritance’, but I can’t find any information on it. Does anyone know what this is exactly?
In v7, you could derive a symbol from a non-derived symbol, but not from a derived symbol. In v8, you can derive a symbol from another derived symbol.
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It means that you can derive a symbol from a derived symbol. Previously if a symbol was already derived from something else, you could only duplicate it, now you can also derive another symbol from It.
As far as I know this doesn’t really do much. A derived symbol will inherit graphics from the parent symbol - you can not edit shapes, pins etc. What you can edit is fields in symbol properties (name, footprint datasheet, description etc.).
If you derive a symbol from a derived symbol you still can’t edit symbol graphics, and you achieve the same result as if you duplicated the derived symbol.
Maybe in the future there will be additional functionality for this feature.
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