kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Oliver Walters <oliver.henry.walters@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jon,

Using the SVN functionality of GitHub it's possible to do the following:

a) Partial checkout (individual libraries as required)
b) Checkout latest master
c) Checkout tagged releases (e.g. 4.0.7)

It would be "simple" to implement this using Python using the svn bindings.
Would this be a good way to approach this? I'm not sure how to integrate
that into KiCad - is this possible?

If yes, and you can give me some pointers, then I think that (weirdly) the
python / svn approach will allow us to have a pretty powerful library tool
pulling data from GitHub

Thanks,

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:26 AM, Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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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>>
>