Comment 5 for bug 1732236

It's not as if I didn't think about it. It's one of those damned if you
do, damned if you don't decisions. If I automatically replace illegal
characters, someone will file a bug report about symbol names not being
respected. If I don't replace the illegal characters, then you could
end up with broken symbol links. I'm fine with changing this if that
what most users prefer.

In the future, I would like to stop using the file name as the symbol
name. There already is support for names in the footprint library
format which would eliminate the file name character restriction. I
would also use some kind of escaping mechanism for the ':' and '\'
characters in the LIB_ID parser which would allow users to use any
character except for new lines for library item names.

On 11/16/2017 3:00 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> I'm really disappointed we don't have a smoother way to handle this.
> Historically we have allowed forward slash in names, and there are
> several component vendors who use them in their part numbers. It's a
> shame we can't continue to allow them in names, but even if we don't I
> feel like we should adapt old libraries properly. You're right that we
> can't _silently_ change them but we should offer to do it for the user.
> Otherwise people are going to be surprised and not understand why their
> parts suddenly don't load when 5.0 is released.
>