kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Strontium <strntydog@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hell Carsten,

On 08/04/18 13:33, Carsten Schoenert wrote:
> Am 07.04.18 um 17:34 schrieb Strontium:
> > Attached is a patch for discussion only.
> >
> > Its the minimum change I could come up with to implement a unique
> > version specific config directory.
> >
> > Nick mentioned changing XDG_CONFIG_HOME, that will not work on Windows
> > or Mac.
> > And on Linux, etc it will change from "~/.config/kicad" to
> > "~/somethingelse/kicad" which would work, but isn't a very friendly
> > naming scheme.
> Changing XDG_CONFIG_HOME itself wouldn't be correct. XDG_CONFIG_HOME is
> pointing to '$HOME/.config' and XDG_DATA_HOME is referencing to
> $HOME/.local/share.
>
> I'm sure Windows and Mac have similar variables for the folders that
> should contain the logical same content.
yes, its not obvious from the patch I sent, because I left that code 
unmodified, but the config path is obtained using the wx call: 
wxStandardPaths::Get().GetUserConfigDir()  Kicad doesn't know about the 
platform specifics, it relies on wx to provide them.

ONLY if the platform is not windows or mac will it also read 
"XDG_CONFIG_HOME" and use that for the base of the configuration 
directories.  My patch does not change how kicad gets the configuration 
path, it only allows there to be two paths and if it has to create the 
current path, it copies the configuration from the previous config path, 
in order that current configuration is preserved on a version upgrade 
but not changed for the previous version.
> The path to the KiCad user config must based on such variables plus the
> preferred name for the config folder, so like kicad-5 (for KiCad5) and
> kicad-6 (for future version KiCad6) and kicad-nightly (for devel
> version). GTK is doing this for a long time.
>
> > $ find  ~/.config -type d -name gtk*
> > /home/carsten/.config/gtk-3.0
> > /home/carsten/.config/gtk-2.0
> If KiCad will introduce some version specific user config and data
> folders (which I appreciate to see) it will be needed to configured by
> the build environment and not hard-coded in the binaries.
I suspected as much, however I do not know how one would go about that 
for kicad.  As to whether we do this now, later, or at all, The jury is 
still out, I just was looking at the scope of the change should kicad 
decide to do something like this.
>   The variables
> can be overwritten with some additional value given while starting the
> applications.
>
> e.g.
> take the default folders
> $ kicad
>
> override the setting for the default config etc.
> $ KICAD_XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/my/special/folder kicad
It would be easy enough to add a unique environment variable which 
superseded XDG_CONFIG_HOME if set.  Is this portable to windows and mac 
though?