kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mário Luzeiro <mrluzeiro@xxxxx>]

Hi Cirilo, all,

Related with the plugins and APIs, I have in mind some open questions related with:

- will it be possible to build the plugins without using kicad source code? Maybe for some type of plugins it will be easy to have an API, but for things related with kicad, it can be an huge library or dependencies.
- will some plugins be embedded in kicad sources by default? or will be packaged in the installers?
- how kicad project will adopt / manage / integrate that plugins?

Mario

________________________________________
From: Kicad-developers [kicad-developers-bounces+mrluzeiro=ua.pt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Cirilo Bernardo [cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 28 October 2015 00:32
To: KiCad Developers
Subject: [Kicad-developers] update on 3D refactor

Thanks to nickoe I'm finally able to build on MSWin and was able to
get the dynamic plugins working on that platform. With some help on
the kicad IRC channel I was able to make changes and verify that
dynamic plugins work on OSX as well. (On MSWin I will need to do
some more work - the file selector visuals are unbelievably ugly at the
moment, but this really has nothing to do with dynamic plugins.)

Now that I know how to make dynamic plugins work I should be able
to (1) finish the implementation of 3D model loading via dynamic
plugins, and (2) create a dynamic plugin scheme for Export functions
so I can finally implement an IGES exporter. My intention with the
Export plugins is to make it possible to implement a dynamic Export
menu and to load exporter code as required; the implementation
will make it possible to add more export options without touching any
KiCad source files at all. In principle dynamic plugins can also be
implemented for Importers but I believe the Export plugin job will keep
me busy for a long time since an API must be developed to interact
with KiCad and this will not be a trivial task.

I'll finish work on (1) first of course so we can take advantage of Mario's
new renderer and have 3D previews of model files as we browse them.

- Cirilo