For what it's worth, I went to SnapEDA and downloaded the LM555 symbol/footprint in V3 and V4 formats (they don't have V5 or V6 yet) using 5.99 and it worked fine.
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On 2021-10-20 10:42 a.m., Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Albert
Marsh via groups.io
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2021 8:41 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [kicad-users] Upgrading from an old version of KICAD
Thanks for the input Craig. I seem to recall a couple years ago that there was a
file format change for the modules and footprints. That was my main concern. I
also recall people mentioning scripts that could be run that would convert one
type to another. I do not relish the idea of redrawing all of the items we have in
our libraries. Luckily, a great number of the parts share the same footprint,
such as 0805, or soic-8.
I've been using nightly versions for production work and have a number of parts I have to use in older library formats (eg: anything downloaded from the 'net is generally still in the older format). The 5.99 version will open these parts, but you will not be able to edit them. You have several options, which is best will depend on how much interoperating you plan to do with the two different versions.
* Keep all libraries in the old format. The 5.99 builds will read these just fine, but you'll have to run 5.x to make any updates. This is the best option if you still need to support earlier versions for a while.
* Write old-version components you need to edit to a new format library. This is what I do since I'm mostly grabbing footprints from online. I am only working with 5.99, so I save the old version part in the new format where I can make any tweaks or changes desired, and I don't care about updating the original source.
* Convert everything to the new formats. You'll probably want to do this eventually, but probably not as a first step!
--
Charles Steinkuehler
cstein@...
