Libraries multiple access

[Grigory]

Hello,

With circuits work little team (3-4) engineers. Each create components. Сomponents of any engineer are used by everyone. Sometimes there are mistakes. And new projects has correct libraries. Old projects need support with errors in libs.

Now each project has local libs and sometimes we copy components from locals to global libs. But it is very difficult and long time process. And create new mistakes.

How to create multiple access to libs? Perhapce git? Do you have ideas?

[der.ule]

I am now sure if you have seen this two FAQ by @Rene_Poschl, they are quite informative and help a lot with how to set up different scenarios.

Library management in KiCad version 5

Disclaimer: screenshots taken in nightly from between version 5.0 and 5.1. Version 5.0.x looks slightly different. Version 5.1.x will look like the screenshots show. This is a detailed lecture. If you want to know how to simply add some assets you downloaded to KiCad then you can read the shorter tutorial How to get a downloaded symbol, footprint or full library into KiCad version 5? Summary KiCad does not automatically detect libraries! There is no special library location (you might still ca…

Project and libary setup for sharing and collaboration (KiCad version 5)

Centralized (global) library setup Why would you use a global setup? The benefit of global libraries is that this type of setup scales very well with the number of managed projects and library assets. It is especially well suited for collaboration within a relatively stable team (example within a company). This includes sharing projects between different computers owned by you. In this case the one time effort required by every user to set up the central (global) library pays of during the prol…

[Naib]

What you want is a controlled library that is still permitted to develop but does not impose itself on existing designs.

I would recommend git and tag different releases. The HEAD can still plow ahead
With fixing issues or adding new parts but different projects can just checkout a specific release (possibly with a tag). They also have the option to branch to isolate the exact version they worked with when the project is frozen.

I ran into something similar with MATLAB:simulink where existing projects need to still use the library entries the model was developed with (bugs and all) but the rest of the team needs to evolve. It needed to be quite simple otherwise people would either force the library never to fix bugs OR people would have uncontrolled versions

For kicad o was thinking of using submodules for each sublibrary but it got unmanageable so I have my library under git control