kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mário Luzeiro <mrluzeiro@xxxxx>]

Hi Cirilo,

>>> - 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.
>> The plugins can be built without the kicad source; all you need are the correct headers to implement the API.
> "Plugins only need to include the appropriate API header files; they will not need to link to KiCad or know the details of KiCad's internal data."

The thing is, let say you want to make an export and you need the BOARD structure, then you expect that it exists some header files that define all items in the BOARD.
As far as I understand, at the moment, kicad have this structure defined in the same place of the implementation and usage in kicad.
So, there is a no clean library that can be extracted from kicad (a library with only its dependencies) and used both by kicad it self and by external plugins.
As we have the things at the moment, you have to use the includes from kicad.. and checkout the whole kicad project.

Ideally what I was thinking is that the headers that the plugins can use, can be extracted from kicad and an API will be created and kicad will use it as an API too.
So some one that can develop a plugin, only need to checkout the APIs and not the full kicad project.

Mario