(2026-08-05, 17:54)tom alphin Wrote: Travis, this is useful information, thanks for sharing.
I guess that I am still not sure why a process level workaround (like the "_unofficial" filename) wouldn't make sense in the rare case where a subpart in the "s/" folder needs to be modified to support a new part without breaking backwards compatibility with an existing part. This would be easy to manage with a git-style fork containing only the updated subpart and the small number of parts impacted by the change, but I do not think LDraw Parts Repo has branching capabilities.
The biggest point of confusion comes from the disconnect between what is shown on the website and what is shown in LDraw.
- Whatever script generates the preview image shown on the website uses the unofficial subparts (ex: https://library.ldraw.org/parts/50658 )
- The same part appears broken in LDView and MLCad, likely other apps as well.
---Tom
The current LDView behavior is obviously causing a problem, but simply updating it to prefer unofficial files over official ones isn't a working solution. Each time the library is released, the unofficial files in that release that are no longer unofficial disappear from the unofficial parts list on the ldraw.org server, but LDView doesn't really have any way to be aware of this. So, if you have an unofficial file which is updated right before the release, LDView will never notice the update. But since it will then pull the file from the official list instead, this doesn't cause any problems. I'm not saying that this isn't something that can be fixed, but given how little time I spend on LDView, it's not something that I'm likely to work on.
I'm pretty sure that the web site's image generation happens with an LDraw library where all the unofficial files go alongside the official ones (overwriting them when there are updates to official files). TBH, if what you want is to ALWAYS show the latest unofficial files that you have downloaded, that's what you should do also, instead of storing things in the unofficial directory. (This was suggested above by Magnus.)