kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Collin Anderson <metacollin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Apologies to Adam Wolfe, I accidentally sent this to him without CCing to the list.  Sorry, I think you'll get a duplicate email :(.


That's a great idea! I had no idea there was a kicad-extras.dmg in the works.  I need to pay more attention.   FYI, the 'mac-ness' of doing two dmgs, one for the app, one for, well, extras, is very good.  That's something I've seen other programs do and it works very well.  Really, I think the more we can separate user modifiable stuff (or anything that is or has potential to be kept up to date using git) from the .app, the better.  If there is a kicad-extras.dmg, I assume it has a one click drag-and drop style install as well.  That could install to a default location, but it would be nice if one could, from within the GUI, select a folder that normally houses the 'kicad-library' stuff, leaving it up to the user as to it's location.  This allows storage on USB drives, a shared network drive, all sorts of neat stuff. 

Oh, and is there any plans for a good way to merge or easily populate the fp-lib-table? The Wizard is great, but rather tedious for people who just want everything.  I remember putting a fp-library-table file in kicad's support folder, if one did not exist in their Preferences folder, would cause it to be used as their table list, but that seems broken (or maybe I forgot a CMAKE flag? I am not sure).  Basically, what would be ideal in my opinion, is if a new user could download kicad.dmg, kicad-extras.dmg, drag stuff to their /Applications folder, drag stuff to ~/Documents or where ever that has a recent snapshot of the kicad-library git repo and .pretty repos, and when they open KiCad, the fp-lib-table file should default to the github fp-lib-table template if the user doesn't have one (or, and this is important, has one but without any entries) in their preferences folder.  That way, no one is ever left scratching their head as to why they don't have any parts or libraries.  

-- 
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Isaac Asimov

> On Jan 12, 2015, at 7:27 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 <mailto: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 <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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