kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Adam Wolf <adamwolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you were a user, and not building, I would expect an online footprint
install to be under 700 megs, and closer to 1300 megs if you downloaded all
the official footprints for offline use.

It is important not to recreate the search path issues from a few years ago.

Adam Wolf
On Jan 12, 2015 8:28 AM, "Bob Gustafson" <bobgus@xxxxxxx> wrote:

>  It would be good to allow storage on a USB stick too. My KiCad files are
> getting to be a noticeable percentage of the disk space on my Mac Air. A
> 32G stick would be useful to off-load most of those files.
>
> Bob G
>
> On 01/12/2015 01:15 AM, Adam Wolf wrote:
>
> I think this idea has merit.
>
>  If we are discussing large changes to the OS X paths, can I ask for
> another?  Let's move packages3d/ outside of modules/, so I can have users
> who download kicad-extras drag and drop a modules directory full of checked
> out github footprints into their ~/Documents/kicad/ (or whatever...)
> directory, without having to include packages3d/ in both the kicad and
> kicad-extras dmg.
>
>  Adam Wolf
> Cofounder and Engineer
> W&L
>
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 12:56 AM, Collin Anderson <metacollin@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> > wrote:
>
>> Hi, I wanted to give some thoughts on the paths KiCad uses under OS X,
>> and some options to wrangle them all into something more unified and easier
>> to deal with in a non-breaking way.
>>
>>  I'll get right to it:
>>
>>  1. KiCad should never store, nor require, anything in /Library.  This
>> is a root-owned, non-user writable directory, including
>> /Library/Application Support, and is only used if absolutely necessary.  It
>> requires sudo or administrator privileges to create and write to a kicad
>> folder in /Library/Application Support.  /Library/Application Support is
>> strictly for files that are to remain invisible and are managed entirely
>> automatically by a .app bundle, and need to be shared between users on the
>> system, but for whatever reason cannot be stored in the .app bundle.  The
>> Apple developer documentation makes it clear that /Library and ~/Llibrary
>> must never contain files the user might need to interact with directly, and
>> these directories are intentionally hidden and OS X actively discourages
>> manual use of these directories, to the point that they are completely
>> invisible even if the Finder is set to show invisible files.  KiCad should
>> still look here, but the only reason to create anything in
>> /Library/Application Support is if an administrator wants everyone to have
>> certain custom assets, and manually install them here.  They cannot be
>> modified after that, and should not be part of the normal KiCad
>> install/usage mode. But files the user will ever interact with must not be
>> kept in either /Library or ~/Library
>>
>>  Source:
>> https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/General/Conceptual/MOSXAppProgrammingGuide/AppRuntime/AppRuntime.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010543-CH2-SW9
>> (requires a free apple developer account sadly)
>>
>>  2.  It's ok, and in fact, preferred, to store per-user copies of
>> updatable assets like a lot of what is in the kicad-library folder.  This
>> correctly integrates with features like Time Machine, File Vault, and User
>> Migration.  This may seem like a terrible waste of space, but wasting space
>> is how OS X likes to do things.  A lot of design decisions have gone
>> towards decoupling a lot of things that could be shared by making copies
>> (like all the dylibs and frameworks in .app bundles, for example, making OS
>> X apps balloon to...well, Doc Brown would say 1.21 jiggabytes).  Looking in
>> my own ~/Library/Application Support folder, there are tons of things that
>> could be shared but aren't.  That, and if anyone did want to make a change
>> (which presumably is why they are stored in ~/Library/Application Support
>> to begin with, since if the files don't need to be writeable, they are
>> simply stored in the .app bundle), they do not need administrator
>> privileges.  Sure, I know the rational is that the assets will
>> automagically be updated using git, and that's great, and you want to avoid
>> doing this over and over on a multiuser system.  BUT, what if something bad
>> happens, someone screws up and makes a bad commit that breaks someones
>> project? Or a crash our power outage dies and corrupts assets, but there is
>> no administrator around to clean up or do a git --reset hard on /Library?
>> If those assets are stored in the user's library instead, that user can
>> simply use Time Machine to return to an earlier snapshot and in either
>> scenario, they simply continue working.
>>
>>  Beyond that, maybe they just didn't want to update anything, and
>> someone else does :).  It's silly, but people do strange things.
>>
>>  3. BUT, the ~/Library folder is, just like /Library, never to be used
>> for files the user will need to manage or interact with. Only files created
>> automatically and managed automatically by applications are meant to reside
>> here.  Given that the user may wish to install or modify things in this
>> folder, and at least for now has to manually install things to it and can't
>> do this form within the KiCad app, there really should not be anything
>> stored in ~/Library either.  If an app does not ask the user specifically,
>> the perferred location for files a user may need to interact with is
>> ~/Documents.  This is why, for example, the Arduino IDE stores its
>> libraries, and allows custom cores and all sorts of things to override its
>> default settings (stored in the .app) by simply managing the
>> ~/Documents/Arduino folder.  It's acceptalbe, familiar, and OS X user
>> friendly to store customizable support files in their ~/Documents folder.
>> It's the folder for stuff the user can mess with, not just user-created
>> stuff.
>>
>>  Anyway, I am not advocating the removal of any of the current search
>> paths, but rather adding ~/Documents/KiCad (let's use proper case and make
>> it look nice - KiCad vs kicad - while we're at it :)  ) and give this path
>> the highest precedence - the user should be able to override whatever might
>> be installed elsewhere with whatever they put in this folder.  It would
>> also be a nice place to store documentation if it is auto updated in the
>> future.
>>
>>  I have actually already made these changes in my, uh, personal version
>> of KiCad, and would be happy to put them in a branch, but I didn't want to
>> just shove all this in a merge request, since its a pretty big change to,
>> well, policy on OS X.  I am a newcommer, and its totally possible I missed
>> something and there are very good reasons for how things are done now, and
>> beyond that, maybe no one else wants to do any of this, has a better idea,
>> or doesn't like this one.  Which is fine.  These are just suggestions
>> coming from a long time mac user, and if any of this is something the other
>> devs would like to look into, I'll put up the branch (it also changes
>> comments and documentation to reflect the path changes - I did it a while
>> ago then realized how big of a change I was doing and sort of put it on the
>> back burner).
>>
>>  If this is not something anyone is interested in, I completely
>> understand and I will not mention or press for it again.  Please don't
>> think I am trying to to tell anyone here what to do - I defer to the
>> judgement of all the people who actually wrote those 500,000+ lines of
>> code, of course :).  Sorry about the length again.  I am very bad at being
>> concise :(.
>>
>>  --
>> "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Isaac Asimov
>>
>>
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>
>
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