I appreciate your effort in reading through so many posts to understand. As I said at the very start, my intent was to get feedback as a precondition to proposing this as an official feature request in the right place. That, I got, along with a real sense --that evolved throughout the thread-- that the proposal needed clearer and more detailed communication. We’ve all fallen prey to this, I am sure. When you think the other person will surely understand what you are saying because it is obvious to you…and they don’t. Happens with my wife all the time!
One of the particularly troubling assumptions people seemed to make throughout this thread was that I was proposing that KiCad developers provide libraries populated with, I don’t know, millions of specific manufacturer part numbers and such detail. That would truly be crazy to suggest, yet people read that into my proposal.
The other one was that I was somehow suggesting that the value field had to be eliminated (or something like that). Not so.
Then there are people who clearly have no professional engineering experience who chose to engage with passion. This is great, but, honestly, at some point it is important to understand that lacking context it is difficult to make constructive contributions. When someone with a 40 year carees says “hey, this might be important” the right approach isn’t to attack the person, but rather to engage in a constructive conversation from which, perhaps, both might learn about each other’s perspectives. Sadly, the internet tends to bring out a counterproductive warrior mentality in some people. I’ve been around for a while, it was not very different from this in USENET days, so no big deal, I know the type.
Anyhow, I think this thread has served the stated purpose; to refine the communication of the proposal before making an official request. I’ll probably do that next week. I need to run a few more experiments with KiCad and Python in order to understand things a little better.
Right, and that’s OK. What I am looking at is that the raw out of the box experience with KiCad just isn’t good because important data is missing and there is no guidance as to where to put this data and how to handle it. The BOM is a joke. Without coding you can’t get it to do anything useful.
I think it could even go beyond that. There is no place for a component manufacturer to present their products. Let’s say, for example, that Yageo was interested in providing KiCad libraries for their entire product line. Where do they place their part numbers? Where do they store the values? The value field in the libraries is the same as the symbol name? How can Yageo --or anyone else for that matter-- delivery usable libraries that would enrich the KiCad ecosystem and experience.
If everyone is left to do as they please the thing turns into a tower of Babel situation with no baseline standards whatsoever.
This does not mean that you and I cannot do something else entirely. That’s the other thing people read into this conversation that I never actually said. This isn’t about imposing a rigid system, it is about fixing a broken out of the box experience due to the lack of sensible standards.
I think I will add the issue with the value field to my proposal. Sorry KiCad developers, this is silly. What I have heard so far is that it gets set to the symbol name automatically and the only place you can change it is within the schematic. Well, if I wanted to create a library of every capacitor offered by a company, where do I put the value? I can’t name the symbol with the value, that won’t work. If the value is linked to the symbol name at the library level it is no longer a value field (again, semantics matter). So now I have to ignore the provided value field and add my own “_value” field to make it useful.
I really think KiCad needs a bit of a rethink when it comes to the lack of a sensible starting point out of the box. Advanced users do not need this, they will, as you have and as I will, come up with a system that works. I really think this needs to be fixed.
And, BTW, if schematic does not yet have Python API access none of this can be done by users like me without forking KiCad and bifurcating the ecosystem.