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Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 08:15:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Frank Miles (fpm AT u DOT washington DOT edu) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] [pcb] mainline: redundant attributes: bug or feature?
 (fwd)
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

On 08/14/2017 10:28 PM, Nicklas Karlsson (nicklas DOT karlsson17 AT gmail DOT com) [via 
geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>> I suspect my thoughts were this: the user API should require/expect
>> unique keys (hence get-by-value) but the low level stuff should be able
>> to preserve (erroneous) redundant keys when loading/saving a *.pcb file.
>> Making load/store git friendly is a goal in pcb.
> Attribute with same name added several times may in sort of be interpreted as 
> a list of values. In gschem it is possible to add several attributes with 
> same name but it never make sense and it's not possible to know for sure 
> which value is used.
Greetings,
As a user, I might add my 2-cents to this discussion by saying that I use 
multiple instances of the "Comment" symbol attribute in my schematics. I would 
hate to see this capability be removed. Comment attributes to not span multiple 
text lines. Therefore, I need to add as many "Comment" attributes as I need 
lines of text.

Another item may be that earlier someone posted that only the first instance of 
an attribute is used and subsequent instances are ignored. Why not the last 
instance is used and previous instances are ignored, as in many other 
configuration scripts. That way the latest version would be used and the system 
would be more forgiving. A warning, not an error should suffice.

Girvin Herr

----------------------------

I also make heavy use of multiple "Comment" entries for a given component.

An even nicer alternative (for me) would be to enable custom attribute types.
Currently I use these entries to add hooks that tie entries in our local component
database with the schematics - a custom attribute type would be cleaner.

 	-Frank