kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Thomas Kindler <mail_ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all!

After reading all the other messages, here are my two cents:

The KiCAD installer should just offer to do a full git clone of kicad-footprints
and kicad-libray (which will be split into 3D, templates, etc. for the 5.0
release as I understand).

A full clone takes 3.8 GB. A shallow clone takes 3.6 GB. The .git-direcotry size
is 650 MB vs 486 MB.

So it's not worth the hassle IMHO as shallow clones don't allow to generate
pull-requests without unshallowing them first.

BTW: 2 GB of that checkout is spent on the packages3d subdirectory. We could
just support loading of .wrl.gz/.step.gz to save space.

In 2017, a few gig of harddisk space, and a < 1 gig download should be OK for
everyone. All the other PCB tools, FPGA toolchains, Netflix, etc. are far bigger.

The other suggestions were quite surprising to me -- Github API, downloading
individual subdirectories as .zip, abusing subversion (gasp), gitslave (last
updated 2012), etc. would be a big hurdle and WTF for new KiCAD users.

So why not use git as it was supposed to be used?

best regards,
thomas


On 22.09.2017 03:21, Oliver Walters 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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