kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Joseph Chen <joseph.chen59@xxxxxxxxx>]

Is this a known issue or just me?

With running KiCAD on my linux, I have long noticed that the "help 
documents" are not accessible by the running "KiCAD".  I recently found 
a work-around to make them work for me.  The work-around is to create 
some symbolic links as shown here (if your email reader cannot display 
the long lines, look at the attached the text file that contains these 
links):

./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/pcbnew.pdf -> 
/home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Pcbnew/pdf/Pcbnew.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/cvpcb.pdf -> 
/home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/CvPcb/pdf/CvPcb.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/eeschema.pdf -> 
/home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Eeschema/pdf/Eeschema.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/gerbview.pdf -> 
/home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/GerbView/pdf/GerbView.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Getting_Started_in_KiCad.pdf -> 
/home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Getting_Started_in_KiCad/pdf/Getting_Started_in_KiCad.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/kicad.pdf -> 
/home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/KiCad/pdf/KiCad.pdf

As you can see from the lines,  the symbolic links circumvent the root 
causes of the problem.  The root causes seem to be resulted in with 
mis-assumptions between the codes of "kicad-source" and "kicad-doc".  
Here is the list of some mis-assumptions:

1. The "kicad-doc" assumes that the installation destination directory is
         ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/en/

 while "kicad-source" code assumes that the documents installed by 
"kicad-doc" is located in
        ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/share/doc/kicad/help/en/

2. The "kicad-doc" assumes extra directory layers like "/pdf", "/html", 
ect., while "kicad-source" does not.

3. The "kicad-doc" uses mixed letter cases for file names, while 
"kicad-source" uses mostly lower cases.  While this mixed-case file 
names may not be a problem for Windows OS, it is definitely a real 
problem for Linux, and for OS-X of users who installed OS-X with 
case-sensitive file-system, myself included.

I don't have a good idea how to fix these, but hope someones there from 
the two camps of  "kicad-source" and "kicad-doc" have better ideas.  
Thus I won't need my work-around anymore.

--Joe

./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/pcbnew.pdf -> /home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Pcbnew/pdf/Pcbnew.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/cvpcb.pdf -> /home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/CvPcb/pdf/CvPcb.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/eeschema.pdf -> /home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Eeschema/pdf/Eeschema.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/gerbview.pdf -> /home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/GerbView/pdf/GerbView.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Getting_Started_in_KiCad.pdf -> /home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/Getting_Started_in_KiCad/pdf/Getting_Started_in_KiCad.pdf
./usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/kicad.pdf -> /home/jchen/kicad-local-installed/usr/local/share/doc/kicad/help/en/KiCad/pdf/KiCad.pdf