kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Simon Küppers <simon.kueppers@xxxxxx>]

Hey guys,
There does not seem to be a lot of feedback. I guess I am rather early
to the pcbnew Python Plugin Party ;-)

I have dug deeper into the code and found out, that the plugins are
actually pulled into python using 'import'. I was under the impression
that a python interpreter was instantiated each time a plugin was executed.

This changed everything completely, I have found a good way to organize
the stuff (and I have done it here as an example:
https://github.com/skuep/kicad-plugins/tree/master).

I am currently going with the following folder structure
+ ~/.kicad_plugins/
    - action_plugin_a.py # some other plugin
    - action_plugin_b.py # another one
    + action_plugin_big/ # a big plugin in a folder
        - plugin_big_action.py # containing the ActionPlugin class
        - plugin_big.py # containing some more general stuff
        - plugin_dialogs.py # containing generated dialogs
        - __init__.py # containing the instantiation and register()
        - __main__.py # optional. if available, plugin runs standalone
        + resources/
            - some_other_stuff.png

So everything looks good right now. It just has to be documented somewhere.

Is there a place where documentation about the python plugins is
collected? Again, I hate when these informations are scattered in forums
or other peoples githubs... Also this looks unprofessional ;-)

Best Regards!
Simon

Am 09.06.2017 um 13:09 schrieb Simon Küppers:
> Hey guys,
> With my current work on python plugins for pcbnew, I noticed that you
> quickly want to go ahead and divide up your plugin into multiple
> subfiles (e.g. test_plugin.py, test_plugin_main_dialog.py, etc..)
> 
> Right now, KiCad loads the python files from the hardcoded folders (one
> of them being ~/.kicad_plugins however it does not do it recursively.
> Thus it is not possible to organize the files in a subdirectory (e.g.
> test_plugin/).
> 
> Another thing that I noticed (but did not confirm yet) is, that action
> plugins need actually have "action_" prepended to the .py file in order
> for them to load properly so that they are shown in the pcbnew menu.
> This is also on purpose right?
> 
> I guess my proposal for a _consistent_ handling of python plugins in the
> future might be either
> 1) Make test_plugin/ subfolder and place all files into this
> subdirectory. KiCad recursively loads all plugins in the hardcoded
> directories
> 
> 2) Make test_plugin/ subfolder and place all files into this
> subdirectory. When the user wants to use a plugin, he needs to create a
> relative link in the hardcoded directory to the corresponding entry-file
> in the test_plugin/ sub-directory.
> 
> I am currently leaning towards the 2nd solution. But in order for it to
> be user friendly (also to those who arent computer savvy), each plugin
> needs some kind of installer to perform the copying and linking. I guess
> this solution is also more "linuxy" since I have seen this technique in
> a lot of different applications (e.g. munin plugins).
> 
> What are your thoughts on that?
> 
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