kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jason Whiteman <whitemanjason@xxxxxxxxx>]

I had written up a bug tracker item for paths on the 9/17 and the machine
hard-locked before sending it.   Looks like Win paths were in the sights
for everyone.   The issues are well known and my writeup was about the
problems associated with 3d models but also pointed out templates and other
default paths do not point to their installed locations in the Kicad
install ("root") directory which, for me, is C:\Program Files (86)\Kicad\
for the install root (may vary according to install options or Win OS
version).   Most of the default directories live here under <Kicad Install
Root>\share\kicad (where template, modules\packages3d, etc. live).

The suggestion was (on a "clean install") either to change the default envs
to match the install paths for these items or change the install paths to
match what the env variables point to (this doesn't make a lot of sense due
to the sprawl of directories - but at least would provide a functional
system).

For an upgrade, existing directories should be preserved as to not mess up
someone who's either chosen to create the previous default paths and placed
files there or changed the directories to be something custom.  Should
leave that alone.   But on a fresh install, directories need to sync up
with install paths.

My last comment in the bugreport (not sent due to crash) - was that perhaps
all the mechanism exists in Kicad to set this correctly and it's "simply"
an issue with those who generate the binaries/installer packages.   If so,
the burden of supporting the intended method may be too high as installers
from official distribution servers have not been correctly setting the
environmental variables.   Suggestion would be to fix this upstream (Kicad
source/makefiles/etc) to assume correct paths without need for override.

This is slim on any new content - the executive summary is "I concur".


On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 6:40 PM, Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 8:20 AM, Brian Sidebotham <
> brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>>
> There are problems for sure but I don't believe in adding yet another
> env var if it can be helped, but this may be a complex enough issue that
> an env var would be the best option for the release. On MSWin documents
> and such should go into an appropriate one of MSWin's Known Folders -
> the question then is can we access these folder names via some library
> in MSys/MinGW?
>
>
> My personal preference would have just to have checked
>> "BINDIR\..\share\doc\kicad\help" where BINDIR is gathered from
>> ::wxStandardPaths::Get().GetExecutablePath();
>>
>>
> I have my doubts here; there are too many ways that GetExecutablePath()
> can give you the wrong result - certainly on *NIX there is no guarantee
> what result you will get (but on Linux there are tricks to get it right -
> assuming wxWidgets has a good implementation), but I'm not so sure of
> the behavior on MSWin. Short story: inspect the wx implementation
> before believing the results.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>  I think a well-known path is preferable to yet another configurable path;
> this is true for all platforms. In my 3D refactoring branch there is some
> code which attempts to find a plugins directory using a number of
> known paths. I think for all items specifically associated with the
> kicad install, known paths should be used. For other items like
> 3D models some user configuration should be supported (though
> any 3D models installed by a kicad installer should be put into a
> known path).
>
> - Cirilo
>
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