Isn't the Library Manager actually the problem with DM?

I've been using Composer for about 10 years now and in my honest opinion the way the Library manager is working is the problem. Or to be more precise, the way it is not working, at least for 5.1.41. As the design goes on, a particular cellName will get a lot of cellViews: schematic, config, symbol, layout, av_extracted and so on, and now we can also have the ADE states saved as cellViews. This fills up the cellView column pretty fast, and if you want to have a little backup of a view, specially the av_extracted and layout views are very often duplicated as layouters experiment to reduce parasitics. Configs also tend to get plentiful as schematics are replaced with av_extracted views. If you use something like DesignSync then earlier revisions get suffixes added with _1_2 etc. and needless to say no engineer can guess just from such a name what to use if he is instantiating somebody elses design.

The Library Manager need at least one more column where the viewVariants are listed. That way it would be possible to list variants of a cellView in a more user friendly way. Adding the possibility to place a comment on each variant that shows up in a text field inside the Library Manager somewhere would make "visual scanning" of design data easier.

With such a viewVariants list you could "grey" out the versions of the cellView that are on DM and a right click on a particular variant could offer the possibility to check it out or to ask for a diff vs. the current version.

Talking about diff reminds me that there is no real good way to "diff" views unless they are text. At least not in vanilla Cadence. Normally you would not check out a new version of a colleagues design unless he has made a lot of serious changes. Often you use the block of somebody elses design as a "load" or a "source" for your own design, and you wouldn't like to have that "schematic has been changed since last extraction" error if he is sleeping in Japan while you sweat in Europe and tape/out is tomorrow. Juat to exagerate.

Library Manager hasn't changed much in 10 years and that is the core problem. If Cadence has fixed that for IC66.x then fine, then nothing will happen on DM until industry has migrated in about 5 years (or 1 year after EOL message for 5.1.x series from Cadence)
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Svenn