No i misremembered it. (See my edited post)
But i think this is not guaranteed to stay this way. (In fact i think this is a bug.)
I consider this behavior (no squawks when the footprint’s pad-count exceeds the number of symbol pins) a useful feature. The present discussion (mechanical pads on connectors) is one justification. Some diodes (2 symbol pins) come in SOT-23 packages (3 pads), and some single (3 pins) or dual (5 or 6 pins) transistors come in 8-pin packages. In these cases, forcing the unused pins to appear on the schematic, only to be flagged “NC”, is distracting clutter to me. When importing a netlist I have no complaints if KiCAD throws an error ONLY when the pad-count is LESS than the pin-count.
(I know it’s logically inconsistent, but I have the opposite belief about unused connector pins. If a connector has, say, 15 (electrical) pins, I want to see all 15 of them on the schematic - even if I will mark many of them as “NC”. I would NOT selectively delete unused (electrical) pins from a connector symbol even if it was practical to do so.)
Dale
Warning and Error are two different things, or at least they should be. Error means you can’t complete what you were trying to do. Warning means there might be something wrong and maybe you should pay attention to it but the action can be completed. Warnings are usually useful and you can ignore them if you want to. At least once I removed nonused pads from a footprint and marked the pins as no-connect in schematic. It worked as expected but gave a warning.
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