Introduction to LibrePCB A new, powerful and intuitive EDA tool for everyone

U. Bruhin (the primary author of LibrePCB) answered this question on Reddit ( [link] ): ---Quote:--- Hi! LibrePCB has some very new concepts, especially for library management. You should take a look at my talk at FOSDEM: [this video] (Slides: [link] ) As these are extremely different to KiCad's concepts, it would be very difficult to contribute that to KiCad because they need to provide backward compatibility. And KiCad already has a lot of legacy code, so it would become even worse when changing very fundamental concepts. It's very questionable if KiCad developers even would accept such fundamental changes - actually I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't agree with some of LibrePCB's concepts. So the only way was to create a completely new project. And LibrePCB 0.1.0 is only the beginning - I have many more ideas how an EDA tool should look like. With a standalone project I'm much more flexible to implement new features than if every feature would need to be contributed to KiCad.

It's something we thought about, but I think it's somewhat orthogonal to the question of serialization - you still need code to go back and forth between the representation in the database and the native data structures. See [link] for a deeper discussion of issues around a file format for a font editor. One of the biggest current pain points is dealing with merges in version control (usually git). I think there are ways of dealing with that in an sqlite-based file format, but I worry it would require some custom tooling, especially to make sure invariants aren't violated. Another interesting example is LibrePCB (see [this video] ) who devised their own text based format specifically to make version control more friendly.