eeschema symbol editor derived symbols auto-rename and preserve footprint
Description of situation:
Making a duplicate of a symbol renames the VALUE field of the new
symbol to be the the same as the name of the old symbol if the VALUE
field of the old symbol was the same as the name of the old symbol.
Whereas making a derived symbol keeps the name of the parent symbol.
Additionally, a derived symbol has no footprint or datasheet copied from
the parent.
KiCAD library convention S6.2 says that the VALUE field of a symbol
should be the same as the name of the symbol.
The pinout of a derived symbol never differs from that of the parent
as the pinout is copied over upon derivation and all methods of changing
the pinout are disabled for the derived symbol.
Assertions:
As the pinout of the derived symbol cannot differ from the parent
usually the derived symbol will use the same footprint as the parent.
But not always, as often MSSOPs and SOICs will share pinouts and
SOT-23s and SC-70s will share pinouts.
Behavioral changes:
Change behavior so that derived symbol will have a VALUE field which is
the same as the name of the derived symbol if the VALUE field of the
parent symbol was the same as the name of the parent symbol.
Change behavior so that the derived symbol will copy the FOOTPRINT
field from the parent symbol.
Merge request reports
Activity
474 480 break; 475 481 476 482 case VALUE_FIELD: 477 if( parent->IsPower() ) 483 if( parent->IsPower() || valueFollowsName ) 478 484 field->SetText( name ); 479 485 break; 480 486 481 case FOOTPRINT_FIELD: 487 // FOOTPRINT_FIELD is copied from parent as the derived and parent symbols This is definitely a false assumption. Same pinout != same footprint. Easy example: https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/74HC86.pdf
I think that this should still be cleared
It's right a lot more than it's wrong.
And when you duplicate a symbol it not only copies this but it copies the datasheet too.
If it's okay to have a wrong datasheet and footprint on occasion when duplicating it's hard to see how it's worse to have a wrong footprint on occasion when making a derived symbol.
Yeah, I tried to ask what should be done on the developers list because this didn't seem like it would be the right place. I did it last week. I wrote up quite a bit of text making the case as to why it doesn't make sense for a derived symbol would seem like it would share some with its parent. I did that to ask what to do before writing any code. But it doesn't appear that reached the right audience so I did this.
@stambaughw Can you look this over? It looks up your alley
Hi, I'm closing this because I believe this MR added the controls you want: !2252 (merged)