eeschema cut and paste annotation lost

[Dino Ghilardi]

Cutting a part of a schematic to paste it somewhere else looses components annotation.

To reproduce:
  Select a component
  cut it with ctrl-x or right-click-menu->cut
  paste it with ctrl-V or right-click-menu->paste.
  The component annotation of the pasted items is lost.

This can be a problem when on complex projects you have to re-organize schematics but you have yet routed the board: re-annotating the components generates a schematic that is not in-sync with the pcb and re-syncronizing it (F8) with different annotation may be is not so easy (did not try it: I have a too complex board).

In "copy-paste"operation is correct to clear components annotation, since without doing that we would end up to a "duplicate references", but in "cut-paste" the annotation should be kept.

May be the easiest way to handle this correctly is:
 -after a cut or copy the reference of the components in clipboard should be reset only if that reference exist in the project (this handles also the case where cut is followed by more than one paste)
Since a copy does not remove the components the cut-paste, copy-paste, cut-paste-paste-paste, copy-paste-paste-paste... are all handled the same way.

On the 5.1.2 version the cut+paste works correctly without loosing annotation.
On the 5.1.4 version the cut+paste works correctly without loosing annotation.

May be this issue is related to the fix for Bug #1833205 (I did not verify if it is true, but that one also is about component annotation in copy-paste operations)

Cheers,
Dino.
-----------------------------------
Application: Eeschema
Version: (5.1.0-1450-g38fc51c3b), release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.2
    libcurl/7.52.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2s zlib/1.2.8 libidn2/0.16 libpsl/0.17.0 (+libidn2/0.16) libssh2/1.7.0 nghttp2/1.18.1 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.2 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 2.24
    Boost: 1.69.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.8.0
    Curl: 7.52.1
    Compiler: GCC 6.3.0 with C++ ABI 1010

Build settings:
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Tony Kerr (ajkerr-4)]

This is absolutely frustrating. I have found that, if I copy a component and paste it, behaviour is as expected - the new component has the same attributes as the original, with the reference field cleared (e.g R?, U?, C? etc).

If, however, I edit any of the fields and THEN attempt to copy and paste, the new component has all the fields blank.

A work around appears to be to edit a component, save the schematic, CLOSE Eeschema and re-open it, then copy and paste the component.