kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think it would make the most sense to do option (a), possibly also
leaving open the possibility of changing the updates source location (for
example, it's conceivable to have a mirror server at kicad-pcb.org that
contains snapshots of the libraries that are compiled from the Git repo
whenever it's updated using a Jenkins job).

-Jon

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 9:21 PM, Oliver Walters <
oliver.henry.walters@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Ok, now that the website integration with the libraries is (pretty much)
> done, and the licensing issue seems to be sorted, there is one final puzzle
> piece to solve before I'm happy with the state of the libraries for a v5
> release.
>
> *Goal: *Merge all footprint library repositories into a single repo to
> solve the ongoing dramas of maintaining 100+ repos.
>
> *Problem*: The *only* thing standing in the way of just doing this is
> that some users like the GitHub plugin and previous instruction is that
> this functionality cannot be removed.
>
> The GitHub plugin functions by downloading a .zip file of a .pretty repo.
> If we merge all footprint libs into a single repo with multiple
> subdirectories, this will not work anymore (as GitHub dosen't allow you to
> download a .zip of a single subdirectory).
>
> Merging the repos is the *right thing to do*. But how to proceed?
>
> *Options:*
>
> *a) Drop github plugin feature, replace with library-download tool*
>
> I don't think it is a good idea to live-load library data from GitHub (a
> lot of other users agree too). It's slow, and a waste of bandwidth to
> re-download the libs all the time.
>
> We drop support for loading libraries direct from GitHub. However, we add
> a tool for downloading libraries from GitHub and storing to disk. Users can
> update as they like. This can be integrated in KiCad and new users can run
> this tool when they first install KICad. This means that no libs need to
> distributed with the installer and users can update to latest libs whenever
> they want.
>
> *b) Improve github plugin to allow subdirectory traversal*
>
> This is difficult and will only result in the plugin being slower. There
> are two ways I can see to do this:
>
> i. Use Git API - tools exist that use this functionality -
> https://github.com/KinoLien/gitzip
> ii. Use subversion - GitHub actually provides subversion API -
> https://www.seanw.org/blog/download-git-repo-subdirectory/
>
>
> *Subversion*
>
> In either case, I think that using the subversion tool to partially
> download the libraries would be a good approach (I assume quicker than
> using wget and the GitHub API).
>
> 1. Does anyone have any experience using the C API for SVN?
> 2. The Python bindings are pretty good - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/svn
> - and much easier to use. However, can we make the library download tools
> dependent on enabling the python plugin?
> 3. Is there a way to checkout a subversion remote to memory (to replicate
> the functionality of the current GitHub plugin)? If not, I'm not sure how
> to approach option b) above.
>
>
> Feedback appreciated. I think that it is very important especially for new
> users that this is improved. The GitHub plugin is constantly causing
> headaches!
>
> Cheers,
> Oliver
>
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