kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Eeli Kaikkonen <eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx>]

There are some people in the user forum who have spent time with these
v4->v5 problems, including me and Rene. The consensus about the environment
variables seems to be what Rene already said, that they should not (without
explicit user intervention) be set for the system, but from KiCad itself.
Nick confirmed that the current v5 installer won't set them by default.
They are still a problem if they have been set by v4 installer.

su 15. heinäk. 2018 klo 5.04 Strontium (strntydog@xxxxxxxxx) kirjoitti:

> I honestly think each major revision of KiCad should be considered a NEW
> program, installs to a new place has its configuration and libraries all
> in a new location.  Only Incremental updates 5.0 -> 5.1 should be
> considered upgrades.
>
>
I agree. It's probable that many users will want to continue with v4 for
old projects but v5 for new, and in the future the same thing will be true
for v5 vs. v6, because they break the file/project compatibility. But where
the compatibility is kept it's more likely to be considered as just an
upgrade.


> Kicad configuration isn't complex or onerous so if a user wants to bring
> a Kicad4 config into Kicad5 or 6 or whatever, then they do that
> themselves, otherwise after install Kicad5 is a fresh blank sheet with
> no relationship to anything that happened on the users computer in
> Kicad4.  I am not familiar with the issues on Windows, but I would have
> thought now this is mostly a packaging issue only??
>
>
I tried modifying the Windows installer, I only needed to replace some of
"KiCad" strings with "KiCad5" and it can install v5 alongside v4
independently. The only problem is the configuration and the environment
variables set by v4. They can be handled with a startup script. See
https://forum.kicad.info/t/does-v5-have-to-overwrite-on-install/11282 for
some details.

I also agree if it can't work this way now on Windows, then its all a
> bit late for V5, but maybe V6 can consider itself a new program distinct
> from V5.  This would also help with testing, because users could use V5
> for daily work, but also easily install a V6 daily side by side.
>

All this could be done with the Windows installer, provided that a startup
script would be offered.

To make this all, at least the startup script, as simple as possible I
would suggest one (or three) small changes to KiCad (for 5.1, or even
5.0.1?). Add command line options --config=/path/to/config and
--ignore-env-vars. The former is obvious and would override
KICAD_CONFIG_HOME system environment variable. The latter would make KiCad
ignore all system environment variables and use the current internal logic
and the path settings UI instead. That way the old variables could be left
for v4 and the newer versions would be completely independent if the
command line switches were used. The command line switch for the config
path would be mostly for convenience. In Windows starting a program with
custom environment variables is tedious and error prone to write (see the
above mentioned thread). Command line switches are much easier.

It could also be possible to make --ignore-env-vars=true by default.
Sharing the environment variables would be a special case if the user wants
that.

The general problem with using system environment variables is that they
are good for situations when there's only one version of a program on the
system, and/or several processes share the same variable values. Neither of
them is true for parallel installations of KiCad.

Eeli Kaikkonen