I’d like to be able to convert my V8 design files to V7.
Is there a tool to do this?
Thanks.
May I ask if you are having issues with v8 leading to this request? As far as I’m aware there is no such tool available.
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Too bad.
To answer your question: yes, the change to V8 has been very problematic, with lots of issues, bugs, etc.
This even though I waited until 8.0.6 before upgrading.
7.0.11 is the most stable and reliable KiCAD that I know, and I’d like to go back, even if that means manually recreating my projects/schematics.
V8 suffers from severe symptoms of “Second System Syndrome”, with odd functionalities added due to special interests. On top of that, it’s buggy, slow and does strange things.
Example: Opening the symbol library is slow enough. It’s been made even slower by loading all the footprints as well. Why?
If you follow some of my posts, you’ll see that I thought the V7 simulation interface in schematic sucks. V8 is even worse and buggy on top.
And, and, and.
I appreciate the developers’ work and am really happy to have a tool like KiCAD available. But I want to stay with 7.0.
Thanks.
So that you can choose footprints at the time you choose symbols (and preview them). This is not a new feature in V8, and it can be disabled in the schematic editor settings (in editing options)
OK. I would guess that the simulation interface, as with all other parts of KiCad, will keep changing and evolving according to the issues and feature requests that people report on GitLab.
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Those were just a few examples.
But it’s moot, I’ve reinstalled 7.0.11 and am reworking the updated schematics back to V7.
Thanks.
That’s unfortunate to hear (but appears to be a fairly isolated view). We’d appreciate GitLab reports of the issues and / or bugs you’re experiencing (https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/new).
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Could be. In my experience (which includes sales and marketing), complaints are a sign of interest.
Silence means you’ve lost the customer.
Think seriously about the “second system syndrome” comment. I’ve seen it happen so many times with good software.
Concerning GitLab: sorry, I’m allergic to that. And as my V8 is gone, I’ve nothing to report.
But it’s OK. I’m back in action again with V7.
As a developer of an open source tool myself I have to defend the KiCad devs (and @JamesJ) here. It is always very annoying if users come with almost passive aggressive comments about how to go back to the old version because the new version is so buggy - but not reporting any actual bugs in the issue tracker. Even when asked to do it so your issues could be resolved.
For what its worth, I’m using KiCad since version 4 and to me version 8 seems to be the most mature version. I personally wouldn’t want to go back to version 7.
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I’m certainly not dissing the developers. I invited you to look at other of my threads for examples of V8 problems reported.
I asked a simple question, and JamesJ asked why I wanted it. That started the discussion, not my question.
If by “mature” you mean it has the most features, then I agree.
But to me the word means reliable and stable. I’ve never had my machine hang using V7, but it’s happended several times with V8, where I had to kill the process (I’m on Linux).
And quite frankly: why not have a “Save As” feature that allows you to save a project in an earlier version format?
All office programs have that to be able to communicate with other users.
THAT would be a major leap.
Office suite user bases are counted in hundreds of millions and the needs are totally different compared to a niche application suite. For both the users and for office suites themselves interoperability and compatibility is a matter of life and death.
Apart from the development effort required (we work hard on forwards compatability, but backwards compatability is not considered), it raises huge questions about the semantics of features that are not supported in prior versions. Some of those features change the semantics of a schematic which superficially look visibly similar (for example) - handling that is approximately impossible (or very difficult at best) in a safe way.
Frankly, I’d like to stop this thread.
I asked a simple question which was answered, and then met with a counter-question.
I was stupid enough to reply honestly, and I regret that now.
I’ve been turned into the Complaining Bad Guy.
I wish I had lied and said something like: “I’m cooperating with people, where some are on V7 and some are on V8. That makes life very difficult.” It is even true, but just a part of the problem.
Over and out, Cheers. (and Thanks for all your work!)
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