I designed a schematic in Kicad. I’m a beginner. I found that the library for one chip had a pin that was marked in the library as an output when it was an input. So I changed it. This made Kicad unhappy when I reopened the schematic and it said I should “rescue” the chip. Not knowing what it meant I let it do it. Finding nothing had changed I looked around and found a copy of the chip’s library file with rescue in it. It had the wrong direction for the pin. So I deleted it. Then I decided to start over. But before I did I renamed the library for the chip and put it in a different folder. Then I created my new schematic, and to my surprise and disappointment, the direction was still wrong. So I opened the first schematic and it gave me an assert when I went to the dialog to manage libraries. Things went downhill from there. There were obviously cached paths to that library and they were all messed up now. Finally I uninstalled Kicad and reinstalled it. That didn’t solve the problem so I uninstalled it again and started searching my system for anything named kicad. I found usr/share/kicad and deleted it. I also found home/pi/.config/kicad and deleted it. Then I reinstalled. Somehow it still had the cached path to that library, but for some reason it didn’t reinstall usr/share/kicad. This caused errors in other places. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling a couple more times and gave up.
Regarding your problem (or misunderstanding) of the rescue stuff:
The rescue feature is there to ensure that a schematic does not change without the user being involved just because something changed in the library.
This is achieved by copying the symbol from the so called cache library into a rescue lib. That rescue lib is then added to the list of libraries.
In version 4 this is all the dialog must do. However you now have the same symbol names twice in the library setup. This means you get the rescued symbol if you add the same symbol to the same schematic later as kicad 4 does not store where it gets the symbol from. (More details regarding the need for symbol name uniqueness and priority management in this post)
If i remember correctly, the symbol name in the rescue dialog should be suffixed with “rescue” (This might be version dependent) So if you add it anew then you should see the symbol twice in the add symbol dialog (once with some suffix and once without.) If no suffix has been added then you need to delete the symbol from the rescue lib.
The correct workflow would have been not to rescue the symbol. (Deselect the symbol from the rescue list) This tells kicad to take the changed version of the symbol from the library. (Yes this dialog is unintuitive)
In version 5 you should have less of a problem as kicad stores the library name with the symbol. So it does not need to add a suffix to the symbol name. It simply replaces the library reference. This can then easily be edited in the library reference editor found in the tools menu. (or even in the symbol properties dialog)
Why did reinstalling not solve anything?
Well the symbol library setup is stored within the project file. (In version 4) In version 5 the rescue lib is added in the project local sym-lib-table.
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