Comment 6 for bug 1843834

Chad,

As a developer of many large code bases, I appreciate your concern for the purity of the code. As a user, I just want it to work. Allowing thermals on pads would solve the problem. A separate clearance parameter for pads might be useful for other reasons but would not work well for my use case because I still want the DRC to catch other non-zero pad clearance violations.

Still, adding back the exception for zero clearance pads in the DRC seems like the simplest solution. I checked out the code and this change was all I needed:

    @@ -637,7 +637,7 @@ drc_callback (DataType *data, LayerType *layer, PolygonType *polygon,
         /* fall-through */
       case PAD_TYPE:
       case PIN_TYPE:
    - if (clearance < 2 * PCB->Bloat)
    + if (clearance && clearance < 2 * PCB->Bloat)
         {
           /* The clearance is too small, but it could be cleared by other
            * objects.

You could add a checkbox in the DRC config to toggle this behavior.

Thanks for all your hard work.

Joseph