kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Strontium <strntydog@xxxxxxxxx>]

After considering my patch, what about the following proposal:

Just change the hard coded string in common.cpp (at around line 243) from:

cfgpath.AppendDir( wxT( "kicad" ) );

to

cfgpath.AppendDir( wxT( "kicad.v5" ) );

(or some other string)

Thats it.  Then Kicad Version 5 will have a unique configuration 
directory that will not conflict with version 4.

If an end user wants to bring their kicad V4 configuration over to v5, 
they just copy it themselves.  Otherwise it starts with a brand new 
blank configuration.  Alternatively packaging might be able to copy it 
over.  But i don't see any real need to do it for the user at that 
stage.  Its just a complication.

Then when the development branch is forked, just rename this again to 
something like:
cfgpath.AppendDir( wxT( "kicad.v6dev" ) );

(or whatever).

Then an end user can have V4, V5 and a Nightly all on the same machine 
and configurations won't conflict.

Anything more exotic can be deferred to V6 development.

Steven




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.
>
> 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. 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