kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Blair Bonnett <blair.bonnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 4 November 2014 09:43, Adam Wolf <adamwolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Before we get too far down that path, I think there is a better set of
tools for caching
> Github results locally--git.
>
> I work relatively often from airplanes or countries with poor internet
access, so I use
> scripts to copy stuff locally.
>
> To be completely honest, I have been confused as to why Dick went
straight for a
> particular Git host's API, as compared to using Git itself.  Disk space,
maybe?
> I am one of the users (like Bernhard, I guess) who doesn't really like
using the
> Github plugin, and uses data on disk instead.  Git provides a way for me
to quickly
> download the new work Carl and the other library folks have done.
>
> If someone wants to talk about this more, I'm up for it.

I'm with you on this -- I love GitHub, but it would also be nice to use
local Git repositories, e.g., for a set of common components that are
stocked in our department and for which the footprints have been checked.
Offline support via caching would also be good -- I'll admit I haven't
played with the copy-on-write option Wayne mentions, but from the manual it
sounds like it only saves local copies of footprints you edit rather than
the whole library.

To this end, some time ago I was playing around with writing a basic Git
plugin working using libgit2 [1] to interface with the repository i.e., no
external git executable required. At that stage I only had
authentication-less HTTP cloning working, but libgit2 supports basic
username + password and SSH authentication. Further down the track it could
also support writing changes back to a repository.

Its currently got a couple of bugs in it and is based against a rather old
version of KiCad. I'll have a crack at rebasing and fixing those bugs soon
-- I might get a chance tonight otherwise it may have to be the weekend --
and posting it here for others to try out.

Blair

[1] https://libgit2.github.com/