KiCad needs a more liberal/open library

Hey qu1ck! We could use help in scripting and CI integration. There’s lots to do, we’d love to make it so for example MRs to generator scripts would automatically make a MR to symbol/fp/model repos once approved, or generate previews and measurements of various things without the contributor having to make lots of screenshots. This is annoying busywork for both contributors and reviewers. Currently a full contribution of say a scripted symbol+fp+3d model requires a contribution to six repos and keeping track of the relations between them. If you are interested in helping with this, please get in touch! Also, if you would like to help with reviewing contributions, we could absolutely use help with that too!

Quick look at gitlab api suggests this is possible but would need a service running somewhere to listen to webhook notifications about MR approvals. Probably something that can be run alongside other kicad services but needs involvement of core dev team.

It will be tricky without eeschema api and with image generating cli only available in nightly but there are workarounds. Also I suspect it will be a very hard to define what exactly needs to be measured.

@kliment can you open issues on gitlab with more details for each problem you mentioned? Feel free to tag me there (username same as on this forum) and we can discuss how these can be achieved.

Sadly, Christian AKA chschlue is not around anymore… He was our head librarian after Rene.

@greg1 There is no a triage process for priority.

@qu1ck Thank you for offering your time and skills!!

I am happy to announce that Carsten Presser is our new library team
lead developer. During our discussions at CERN, he agreed to take over
the lead library developer role which has been doing for some time now.
Please join me in congratulating Carsten on his new “official” role.

Cheers,

Wayne

@cpresser is immediately under pressure…

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Indeed, but it’s a great song!

All of Kicad’s library problems can be solved by adding a library manager.

Installing Kicad will also install the current library in your workstations admin space. Last time I checked I had 100 MBytes of files in /usr/share/kicad. Problem is that I cloned the source from gitlab.com and it had 140 MBytes. My files were way out of date. Can I update them? Easy to do if you are a hobbyist and have root access but not so easy in the corporate world where you have to submit a ticket to IT to get anything done.

So do this instead. Do NOT download any libraries when Kicad is installed. When you create a workspace you run a library manager that lists all of the libs on gitlab.com. Select only the ones you need and download those into the workspace. Come back later if you need any more libs or if you need to check to see if your libs are up to date.

This will also support any or all 3rd party libs from any git hosting servers.

95% of the internet is crap so we will have to deal with a growing number of obsolete parts. The best way is to simply not download them and ignore them.

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