kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/4/2013 1:03 PM, Lorenzo Marcantonio wrote:
> Curious behaviour of pcbnew, I don't know since when it does that...
>
> It happened that I just had a .kicad_pcb file lying in the home
> directory. No project, only the board file. Opened it using "pcbnew
> file.kicad_pcb" as usual. After the "Debug: Loading global footprint
> table file: /home/lomarcan/.fp-lib-table" (which doesn't exist, anyway,
> and IIRC isn't even enabled in cmake) it took forever; then started as
> usual...
>
> Further examination with strace shown that:
> - It stats the .fp-lib-table
> - Get the cwd (i.e. the home)
> - Tries to find the corresponding .pro, the the .pro from the template
> - Stats the /usr/share/kicad/modules
> - Stats the *whole fscking home recursively* so it takes a long time
> - Do an openat of /usr/share/kicad/modules and stats all the .mod inside
>
> Is this something like ``looking under the board directory for
> modules''? AFAIK the new module storage is something like directories
> for libraries and files for modules (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't
> know the design details so I don't know if a full recursion is the
> correct algorithm to find stuff. My home at home has 300Kfiles, at work
> there are 500K or so... the cache helps but anyway it doesn't seem
> correct to me:P
>
> I think that in this case pcbnew is trying to hard to be smart:P If that
> is the case wouldn't be useful add a 'signature file' to a module
> directory (something like .im_a_kicad_module_lib inside...) to prune the
> search?'

This is because I attempted to figure out where the default KiCad 
footprint libraries are installed in order the set the $KISYSMOD 
environment variable so the footprint library table can find them.  This 
is accomplished by iterating over all of the library search paths to 
find the path with the greatest number of *.mod files.  I am not 
terribly happy with this solution either.  I have a better solution in 
mind and will #ifdef/#endif this code out in my next commit so it 
doesn't get included for non-USE_FP_LIB_TABLE builds.  I apologize for 
the annoyance.  I've been on vacation and busy training for a bike race 
next weekend so I haven't spent as much time working on KiCad as I 
normally do.  Hopefully it wont be too much longer.  I'm close to having 
the footprint library table code done for CvPcb.  Please bear with me 
for a few more weeks.

Wayne