Wishlist: pcbnew flag for "footprint has no symbol on purpose" (Prevents deletion on pcb from schematic update)

[Rene Poeschl]

Right now KiCad has no way to know if a footprint on a pcb has been added for good reason without a symbol connected or if the symbol has been deleted. For this reason all such footprints are deleted when the "delete extra footprints" flag is enabled.

A good example for footprints that typically do not have a symbol are footprints for graphical symbols (a company logo, the made with kicad logo, warning ESD sensitive, QR codes, ...)

Right now the only option is to lock such a footpirnt. This is both inconvenient and unintuitive.

My suggestion therefore would be a flag that only ensures the Delete extra footprints flag does not delete that footprint. Possibly this flag could be set if a footprint is manually added to the PCB (or a popup could come up asking if they want to protect it. That popup would however benefit from a "do not ask again" flag)

[eelik (eelik)]

This could be part of https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1745627

[Rene Poeschl (poeschlr)]

I see this a bit different from the lock feature all together. Right now it is coupled but i think that is generally a bad idea. But you are right that report could be extended to also include discussions about other concepts that are similar to locks. I am however uncertain if it is a good idea to have a single report ballooning to such proportions.(Might be hard to handle.)

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

Setting the milestone to 6.0.0-rc1 so this can be included in the "locked" discussion [1].

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1745627

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

Another opinion: A commercial eCAD tool I use separates PCB items into different types:
 - items from netlist (from schematic)
 - mechanical: this was used for things like barcode label box, UL logo, ESD symbol on silk screen; layer indicator on copper etc.
 - drawing: borders, drill tables, fab notes basically.
All this is displayed in an "explorer" with a tree and grid views.

I know KiCad works slightly differently, but I think having different "types" of footprint (selected in the footprint editor properties, editable in Pcbnew) which you could apply locking options too independantly (matrix?) could be useful.

We already sort of have this with the Fabrication attributes.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2399