kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Are you considering attempting to load a file with each available plugin
until the correct one is found or they all fail?  That's not a very
elegant solution.  If you only have a few plugins this may be feasible
but what happens when you have 10 or 15 plugins?   This is one of the
reasons the fp-lib-table exists.  The fp-lib-table is not just a file
path resolution system.  It also handles associating the library (file
or folder of files) type with the correct plugin as well as any optional
parameters the plugin requires to perform it's job.  Relying on file
extensions is always going to have it's issues.  Unfortunately we are no
closer to a file system with file metadata then we were 30 years ago
when the powers that be figured out the whole file extension concept was
broken.  I wouldn't hold my breath on this being fixed anytime soon.

On 3/2/2016 5:19 AM, Simon Wells wrote:
> Handling multiple plugins would be annoying and probably a whole
> different discussion, but it should really only be an issue when user
> plugins are possible if sanity checks are done properly. And it would
> most like have to be a user setting or i have no idea of a better way
> of doing it
> 
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 10:40 PM, Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 2016-03-02 9:21 GMT+01:00 Simon Wells <swel024@xxxxxxxxx>:
>>> After looking into and discussing
>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1551628 with nick i am not sure
>>> the filter is the best way of advising kicad of which plugin to use
>>>
>>> I was thinking the best way to solve this would be for each of the
>>> plugins to have a static
>>>  "bool CanYouHandleThis"
>>> function (obviously with a better name) and when a file is loaded each
>>> of the plugins are checked to see if they understand the file,
>>
>> Yes, I think this is a proper way to do this. After all, it is the
>> plugin that knows if it can parse the file, so having a
>> CanYouHandleThis to sanity check the file or whatever it does to say,
>> "Yay, I can handle this file!", would be a good idea, it could
>> possibly also be used to do some better error reporting to the user.
>> Say; the user tries to open an eagle v5 .brd file which is not
>> supported, it could possibly detect the version type of the file and
>> import the user that the file he is trying to open is v5 and only v6
>> is supported for example.
>>
>>> With each of the responses if they are all no, then a error can be
>>> reported, and for any that are yes the loading can then be handed off
>>> to it/them (if dynamic plugins are enabled at some point in the future
>>> (which you would really need some sort of what can you read interface
>>> anyway) then you may get to the point where multiple can handle a
>>> single file)
>>
>> If multiple plugins can handle a file, how would you handle that
>> situation seamlessly?
>>
>>> This would allow the user to not have to set the filter which i am not
>>> sure many people would think as the problem anyway as far as i am
>>> aware its not the normal method for setting what type a file is. And
>>> also move away from blindly trusting extensions
>>
>> Blindly trusting extensions is indeed problematic as we already have seen :)
>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Simon
>>>
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