tented mounting holes

[whitis]

If you define a mounting hole but don't set the flag
that says no copper because you actually want copper,
it will be covered with soldermask under the assumption
it is an ordinary via.

turning on soldermask display in screen menu and
hitting k enough times to get a hole can help.

[haceaton (haceaton)]

Given that you have copper, it IS a via. A single "k" on the
soldermask will clear the entire hole. There is no
legitimate way to describe this as a bug. Perhaps your
preference would be for all vias to be cleared of solder
mask as the default, but that would just be your preference.

I suppose it would be reasonable to guess that large
diameter vias are likely to be mounting holes and so default
to clear soldermask for vias above some diameter. That would
be a feature request though. As it stands, it's simply up to
you to use the built-in features to set the mask the way you
want. How about suggesting what threshold diameter should be
deemed a mounting hole?

[Colin D Bennett (colinb)]

OK, just realized that the solder mask was going to cover the mounting holes on my board after reading this bug report. It seems like the default for "holes" (i.e., not plated) should be no solder mask over them. Otherwise, what is the purpose of the hole if it is covered but is not a conductive via?

[Traumflug (mah-jump-ing)]

Testing with current Git master shows that vias are by default tented (solder mask diameter zero). Turning such a via into a hole also makes a hole into the solder mask. Turning it back into a via keeps the hole in the solder mask. Maybe not the most convenient user interface, but also not a bug.

That said, a pin/via being a hole and the existence/size of a hole in the solder mask are independent of each other, you can combine them arbitrarily. It just happens that there is no convenient means in the GUI to set such details, but that's true for a lot of stuff.

For a proposal enhancing the GUI, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/pcb/+bug/1488931