[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#1146081: ITP: kicad-footprint-generator -- footprint and 3D model generators for KiCad libraries

[Christopher Obbard]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Christopher Obbard <obbardc at debian.org>
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel at lists.debian.org, pkg-electronics-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net

* Package name    : kicad-footprint-generator
  Version         : 1.1.3~git20260824.af57c119
  Upstream Contact: The KiCad Library Team
* URL             : https://gitlab.com/kicad/libraries/kicad-footprint-generator
* License         : GPL-3+, LGPL-2+, MIT
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description     : footprint and 3D model generators for KiCad libraries
 Tooling used to build the official KiCad footprint libraries.
 .
 Rather than drawing land patterns by hand in the footprint editor, footprints
 are described as parameters (e.g. body size, pitch, pin count, courtyard
 clearance) in YAML and CSV files and generated programmatically. This keeps
 whole families of parts consistent with each other and makes a rule change,
 such as a new silkscreen width, a matter of regenerating rather than editing
 thousands of files by hand.
 .
 The package provides generators for around 35 families of components,
 including chip resistors and capacitors, DIP and QFP packages, ball and land
 grid arrays, connectors, crystals, inductors, relays, terminal blocks and
 mounting hardware. Land pattern dimensions can be derived automatically from
 the bundled IPC-7351 and IPC-7352 density level configurations, so generated
 footprints follow the IPC nominal, least and most material conditions.
 .
 Also included are the KicadModTree and kilibs Python libraries, which give
 direct programmatic access to KiCad footprint primitives (pads, lines, arcs,
 polygons and text) for writing new generators or scripting one-off footprints.
 .
 This package is aimed at KiCad library contributors and at anyone maintaining
 their own component libraries. It is not needed to use KiCad itself.


I plan to maintain this package within the Debian Electronics Team at
https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/KiCad/kicad-footprint-generator

The main motivation for packaging this project is that upstream plans to merge
functionality from the aging kicad-library-utils into this package, eventually
replacing kicad-library-utils.

For more information, see the upstream PR: https://gitlab.com/kicad/libraries/kicad-footprint-generator/-/merge_requests/2095