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Re: GitHub Plugin (my nemesis)

 

+1 also
It allows a company to start with the libraries at some point and keep them consistent (by forking) and they can easily cherry pick changes or do wholesale merges with their changed libraries, as they desire.  And for a casual user who just uses things, "as is" it will just work.

On 28/09/17 09:47, Tiger12506 wrote:
+1 on this approach, to me this is the obvious way that it should be done. However, my opinion is not important, I'm not a contributor. :)

On 9/27/2017 8:37 PM, David Godfrey wrote:
Hi All

I have to agree with some of the other posters, why not use git as it was intended?

Specifically I think the following makes sense.....

- Keep the multiple repositories, this helps when a company only wants to make certain sets of libs available to it's staff

- Have a master repository that includes all other repositories as submodules.

- Have branches that are matched to kicad versions. This allows footprint changes in a version safe way.

- Use standard "git clone" (initial download) and "git pull" (update) on the main repo which provides the entire set of available libs without actually downloading the content for all libs.

- When a specific lib is needed, do similar to what we do now, and use "git submodule update --init --recursive $submoduleName" to just pull that specific submodule

- Allow the "main" library repo URI to be altered. This enables a companies fork of the repo to be used.

- Allow the "main" library repo URI to be ANY valid git URI. That means a repo on a local fileserver rather than a http server can be used. Along with various security options etc.

- Add a fairly simple scripted tool that's run "on release" to retrieve a README.md (an possibly a descriptor/index file) from each actual library repo and update those within the "main" repo. This removes the need to have the current case where manual edits are required to keep the "main" repo in sync with what's available in the individual lib's.

To add a new lib, it's then as simple as (from the main repo) doing something like....
- "git submodule add $URI"
- "./scripts/update-library-indexes.sh"
- "git commit -a -m $'added new module "modulename"\nupdated all module descriptions and index'"
- "git push"


All of the above allows the Main repo to be forked by a company (or individual) and have their own custom repo's added very easily. It even allows libraries to be easily excluded or replaced, all using extremely well developed management tools.

On a side note, git submodules are stored in the main repository basically as URI that includes a commit reference. That means it's easy to specify a specific library version to include in a specific branch/tag of the main repo.


As for the person that said "git isn't available for windows", sorry, that's bunkum. There are many many development environments out there that ONLY run on windows that have git integration. A quick google search for "git for windows" will show what you need to know there.

Finally, wrapping git to duplicate the effective API that's currently in use should be relatively trivial, resulting in virtually no code changes required to KICAD it's self. Assuming the existing functionality is cleanly wrapped by an API, the only real change to KICAD would be the swapout of the module, and addition of an easy way to change the URI


I know I haven't covered everything in this email, but it should be a good outline for further discussion



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