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<@U01819B63HP>:  I came across an unexpected issue in xschem today.  I was looking at Christoph Weiser's bandgap from MPW 7, which I have forked to <https://github.com/efabless/sky130_cw_ip>.
I `cd` to `xschem` .
Then I do `xschem sky130_cw_ip__bandgap.sch` and click on the bandgap (x1) symbol and descend into the schematic.  Everything looks good.
Now instead I do `xschem --rcfile xschemrc sky130_cw_ip__bandgap.sch`, and do the same thing.  Now all three symbols that come from subdirectories are not found.
I was not expecting any difference between using the `xschemrc` file in the working directory, and specifying the same file with `--rcfile`.  What is the difference, and is there a simple workaround?

Yes I see the same issue, investigating.... Thank you for pointing this out.

<@U016EM8L91B> Latest commit in xschem fixes this issue.
Many years back I made the *insane* decision to consider '`.`' in XSCHEM_LIBRARY_PATH not equal to the pwd but equal to the directory of the currently loaded schematic.
This is insane since while traversing the hierarchy each sub schematic may be in a different directory. This generated all sorts of problems.

I have now eliminated this odd behavior. a '`.`' is always assumed to be the current working directory.

When xschem is called without `--rcfile` xschem builds itself the full path of the xschemrc file, so  `/.../.../sky130_cw_ip/xschem/xschemrc`, and this file is sourced (tcl source command)
if `--rcfile xschemrc` is given the filename is taken as given on cmdline, so just `xschemrc`.

the following line in xschemrc:
`append XSCHEM_LIBRARY_PATH :[file dirname [info script]]`
returns the full pathname of the directory containing the xschemrc in the 1st case, while in the 2nd case it returns just `.` and this `.` was handled in the described odd way.
Now a `.` in search path does what most people expect, look in the current directory xschem was started from.

<@U02G0CLTGTH>:  Please read the thread above.  This affects the way that CACE works, since it is running xschem with the `--rcfile` command-line option.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep it in mind when updating nix-eda!