kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/19/2012 05:38 AM, Edwin van den Oetelaar wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Files
>
> Remember that 'Program Files' only is a default location for English installs...
> Would it make sense for a multi-user machine to have stuff installed in a personal
> directory instead of a system directory?
> I have seen systems that would check : ~/.application/ver123/plugins/script1.py and if
> stuff can not be found there go to other places so users can install specific things
> without impacting the other users.

At least one person will have to develop scripts.  That person would prefer "write access"
to the directory where the scripts live and evolve.


A more general observation:

A good [commercial] software application would categorize its various files into a number
of categorical groups, and then give a mapping table to tell where that category of files
actually reside.

This would allow some categories of files to be in a read only directory, and some in a
read/write directory, and each category of files to be relocatable based on the mapping table.

Then you have to find the mapping table without scratching your head too much.


Simply saying that we should support installing in /home/<user> falls far short of the
general solution I mention above.  Our company has implemented the above strategy for our
commercial software applications, and it is pretty simple since there is already
infrastructure to read configuration files and lookup name/value pairs from the config files.

Here the "name" is the file category, such as "footprint_libraries" or "python_scripts",
and the value is simply the path.  The installer has to be able to modify the
configuration file so that the paths get updated to the chosen directories during
installation.  With this scheme, you could have libraries on a company server, without
being forced to install the core executables from KiCad there also.


Get to work.


Dick