Library (symbol and footprint) management

[Harjit]

I’m super impressed by the KiCad library - thank you to the many people who have put in so much time creating it and more importantly, creating the taxonomy, rules, tooling, verification, etc.

My concern is that I don’t know if a schematic symbol or PCB footprint is correct. I understand that people have checked them but mistakes happen or I may want to adjust something about them - for example for microcontrollers, I definitely want to change the Pin description to how it is used in that design.

My ideal flow would be:

1. From the KiCad library, copy the symbol into a “precheck library”.
2. Check it and on passing my checks, move it into a “probation library”.
3. When it is put on a board and the assembly and circuit work, move it into a “proven library”

Based on reading Rene’s and others articles and forum posts, I think I can do this by creating different libraries and moving parts between them.

The piece I’m missing is if there is a change upstream i.e. in the KiCad library, how do I notice it? I think doing a library compare using a version control system and hoping to spot it is going to be difficult.

The other thing I’m not sure - sorry I haven’t tried it being new to KiCad - is can I keep the name the same in the different libraries and force parts to be picked up in certain library order i.e. Proven, then probation, then precheck, then KiCad?

If there is a different / better way to do this, I’d be grateful for your thoughts.

[fred4u]

Seems purely theoretical to me.
If you want to base on Kicad’s library parts, and if you feel the need to verify these in several steps, why not just keep what works for you? There’s really no reason to update the parts if what you already have works (unless there’s a toolchain change that requires e.g. file format update).
Get your symbols (check against datasheets), fooptrints (check aginst the datasheet AND your assembly house), and keep them in your private libs as long as they work.