kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

As mentioned in the bug report here
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/4.0/+bug/1496049 there's a problem
with paths on the Windows 4.0.0-RC1.

So far the paths that don't work:

    (1) Searching for help files fails
    (2) Default paths in the "Path configuration" dialog all point to
places in c:\msys64\mingw64, etc.
    (3) Python footprint wizards don't load

and probably more. Needless to say, the KiCad experience out of the
box because of this is very poor.

We need to fix up the path search which started with the help in the
bug report. The current consensus is to have (yet another) env var
called something like KIHELP which can default on Windows to the
literal string "${KICAD}\share\doc\kicad\help" which alleviates the
previous problem of trying to guess the install path at compile time
which is clearly flawed.

My personal preference would have just to have checked
"BINDIR\..\share\doc\kicad\help" where BINDIR is gathered from
::wxStandardPaths::Get().GetExecutablePath();

However, the decision appears to be to add another configurable path.

While adding the new KIHELP env var solves part of the problem, the
Windows installer should be updated to set the KICAD env var to the
chosen install path while installing. et. voila, paths fixed.

Best Regards,

Brian.