kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8 January 2015 at 13:44, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Fully defined paths can be used in the fp-lib-table if that is your
> preference.  Environment variable substitution is optional.  You are
> free to use any environment variable you want.  KISYSMOD is merely the
> variable name used for the default footprint library path.  I use
> KILCLMOD to point to the path of my custom footprint libraries.  I set
> these paths to the same disk partition and and path in both windows and
> linux so I'm always using the same footprint libraries when I'm
> developing on either platform.

I think it's clear that users of a GUI, and environment variables do
not mix well. Personally I like them as they offer me a lot of
flexibility and I can make scripts to set-up environments that are
useful to me, but I'm a developer and user.

I think the best enhancement we could do here is to have an editor for
expandable variables in kicad. That is, rather than KISYSMOD having to
be an environment variable (which most users appear to think of as a
bad disease!) it could instead be a variable set in the KiCad
settings. The variable in the KiCad settings with the same name taking
precedence, or vice-versa.

It's a simple key-value pair editor that means variables can be
defined in KiCad options through the GUI. This achieves the same thing
as environment variables without the stigma associated with them and
offers the interface for editing the values of those variables in the
GUI that they're associated with.

Add this to my to-do list if you think it's a reasonable idea. It
shouldn't take too long to do.

These variables would be saved to the kicad config. Of course, we
could also complicate things further in the future and have
per-project overrides for the variables too if necessary. I think
something has to be done before the stable release so we're not
swamped with support questions about this.

Best Regards,

Brian.